I
ntel has had a bad time lately. A pair of
far-reaching CPU security issues dubbed
‘Spectre’ and ‘Meltdown’ (presumably
action movie producers were in charge of
naming them) have been all over the
headlines recently, and their impact is far-reaching:
if you have an Intel CPU produced in the last 20
years sitting at the heart of your PC, you’re affected.
The question is: how much? In theory, the
Meltdown exploit allows access to all the bits of your
CPU that were long considered impossible to access,
and thus allocated as secure memory storage. That
means any and all sensitive data is fair game for
potential cyber snoopers. Passwords, photos,
documents, off-colour Skyrim mods: the lot. Spectre is
a similar story, but it doesn’t end with Intel PCs. AMD
desktops, smartphones and tablets of all
denominations can be pilfered of their most secure
information by the latter exploit. It’s a bit of a worry.
Security exploits do crop up, of course, and a
company as big as Intel shouldn’t be dragged across
the coals simply for an exploit being discovered across
its decades-wide raft of hardware. It might seem a
flimsy platitude, considering the scale of the problem,
but these things happen. Frequently. That’s why your
PC wants to restart itself every five minutes – theCaption goes in
here x xx xx xx x xx
xgoalposts of cyber security are forever changing, and
both manufacturers and platform holders need to be
agile in their responses.FEELING THE HEAT
The difference with Meltdown and Spectre is that
they were brought to the world’s attention long before
Intel, Microsoft, Apple, AMD et al were ready to roll
out any fixes. That’s dangerous. It was discovered by
four separate research teams, all working
independently, over the span of just a few months.
They informed Intel, and Intel started work on a fix
for its two-decades-old security flaw. Yet word about
Meltdown and Spectre got out before it was ready.
After the security flaws were made public, news
sites reported that Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich had
sold off a huge number of stocks in the company in
November 2017 – months after Intel had been made
aware of the problem. An Intel spokesperson told
press that Krzanich’s sale was “unrelated” to the
security issues. And as of writing, Intel’s stock is
trading at roughly the same price Krzanich sold it for,
meaning there was no significant monetary gain from
that timing.
Some good news, though: Meltdown hasn’t been as
bad as the gloomier industry voices feared, and we’veThe headlines
were full of worry
in early Jan: two
security exploits
were found that
affected all Intel
CPUs for the past
20 years, and
a raft of
smartphones
and tablets too.
What really
matters, though,
is how it impacts
your framerate.
Obviously.Melting
pointTHE CPU SCANDAL
Spectre and Meltdown affect PC gaming, and there’s no easy fix
TECH
REPORT
Within that
architecture, a
dangerous security
exploit lurks. So
is there a
performance-
friendly fix?The CPU scandal
FEATURE
GHOST IN THE MACHINE