Intel has asked to ignore the most recent updates to fix – or at least stem – Specter and Meltdown, the two serious security problems affecting much of its processors produced in the last twenty years. The advice was disseminated through the company's blog, with a post by its vice president Navin Shenoy, following numerous reports of users who were no longer able to use their computers normally after the update. On some models, the update causes the devices to restart continuously, making them unusable in many cases. Intel says it has identified the problem and is working on a new version of the updates, which will be released as soon as possible.
The press release is aimed primarily at computer manufacturers, cloud service managers and those who build operating systems. The post admits that the tools provided by Intel could: “lead to a higher than expected number of reboots and unpredictable system behavior.” The issue affects several Intel-manufactured processor models, with some appearing to be more affected than others by malfunctioning after updates.
Among the more problematic models are the Haswell and Broadwell processors, for which Intel says it has probably found a solution. A similar problem, always related to reboots, affects the Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, Skylake and Kaby Lake models, for which there seem to be no definitive solutions yet.
In early January, Intel promised to fix most of the Specter and Meltdown issues within a few weeks, but the updates haven't always proved effective. The two security problems, which can lead malicious users to read the data of another device, are linked to how different generations of processors have been designed: they cannot therefore be solved by physically intervening on the components, but through software updates that bypass the design error. The problem is that this causes the processors to become slower, in some cases losing up to a third of their computing capacity. Also for this reason Specter and Meltdown are considered the most serious security problem, and more generally of systems reliability, in the recent history of information technology.
The two security concerns mainly concern Intel, which is the world's largest processor manufacturer, but there are products from other companies like AMD that have similar troubles. Operating system manufacturers such as Microsoft (Windows) and Apple (macOS) have released a first series of updates, but they have not always been successful. Microsoft, for example, had to suspend updates against Specter on some types of AMD processors, because they made it impossible to restart the computers on which they were installed.
