Intel will release Meltdown-resistant patches later this year

Dive Brief:

Intel is working to "incorporate silicon-based change to future products that will directly address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware," said CEO Brian Krzanich, speaking on the company's Q4 earnings call. The new, more secure products are expected to be available later this year.
Despite two separate calls to hold patches, Intel said it is working to "restore confidence in data security with customer-first urgency, transparency and timely communication."
Intel released its Q4 2017 results Thursday without any sign of impact from Meltdown or Spectre. The company reported $17.1 billion in Q4 revenue, an 8% year-over-year increase, according to a company announcement. However, the company remains cautious about the financial impact the vulnerabilities could bring in 2018 earnings.

Dive Insight:

Meltdown and Spectre's disclosure came in too late to cause a real impact in last year's earnings. But the company may experience fallout come April, when it is expected to report its Q1 2018 earnings.

In lieu of issuing a recall, the company has sent customers down a rabbit hole of unreliable patches. The first walk back of its patches came after complaints of "higher system reboots." The company then issued patches for those patches.

Almost two weeks later, Intel told customers, including cloud service providers and software vendors, to "stop deployment" of all current patch updates.

The company said it found the root cause of the rebooting issue but had not yet offered another fix. But nearly 70% of organizations had deployed at least one version of Intel's faulty patches by this point.

The only completely secure resolution is to completely replace all CPU hardware, and Intel's current predicament is highly reminiscent of the recall of the company's Pentium P5 chip in the 1990s.

In the Pentium P5 case, the chip was not a security concern, but rather a problem for engineers reliant on its ability to correctly calculate equations (the flaw was in the chip's ability to calculate). Intel issued a recall for about one million chips and turned them into memorabilia keychains.