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Journalism of Courage
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich on Monday said “security was job number one” for his company and the industry and it was good to see everyone collaborate on finding a fix for Spectre and Meltdown. Delivering his keynote address at CES 2018 in Las Vegas, Krzanich said there were no reports yet of the vulnerability being exploited by anyone. He promised fixes for 90 per cent of the affected products within a week and the rest by end of the month.
“I want to the thank the industry for coming together to address the recent security research violations, reported as Meltdown and Spectre. The collaboration among so many companies to address this industry-wide issue, across several different processor architectures, has been truly remarkable. Security is job number one for Intel and our industry,” the Intel CEO said.
“The primary focus of our decisions and discussions have been to keep our customers’ data safe. As of now, we have not received any information that these exploits have been used to obtain customer data. And we are working tirelessly on these issues to ensure that it stays that way,” Krzanich said at the very start of his 90-minute keynote.
He said the best thing users could do to ensure their data is secure is to apply any updates from operating system vendor and system manufacturer as soon as they become available. “For all processors, products introduced in the past five years, Intel expects to issue updates for 90 per cent of them within a week and the remaining by end of January,” he said, adding that some workloads will have a larger impact than others. “We will continue to work with the industry to minimise those impacts over time.”
The Intel CEO’s statement came at the beginning of the chipmaker’s keynote, which is traditionally one of the showstopper events at the largest tech show in the world. The keynote was devoid of detailed insights into new processors from the company except for a sneak peek into Loihi, Intel’s latest self-learning chip for artificial intelligence. This Neuromorphic AI-based processor works like a human brain. Intel also showcased a new 49-qubit quantum processor chip during the keynote.
Also read: Intel Keynote: Data will change our lives
Intel processors as well as all other processors, including those on ARM architecture, those by AMD, are impacted by Spectre vulnerability, according to Google’s Project Zero which was reported last week. Security researchers discovered the flaws nearly a year back and informed Intel of the same as well.
It has also been reported that the fix for Meltdown and Spectre could slow down the performance of some systems by as much as 30 per cent. However, the company has insisted that not everyone will face a significant reduction in performance. The Intel CEO said during his keynote, “We will continue working with the industry to minimise the impact on those workloads over time.” Krzanich also said he expects all processors to have updates for the vulnerabilities by the end of January.
Disclaimer: The author is attending CES 2018 in Las Vegas at the invite of Intel India, which is paying for travel and accommodation.
