Deep in mind the Meltdown and Spectre settles that Intel is baking into its processors to make them impenetrable to these vulnerabilities at a silicon level, and which are required to be combined into new CPUs that ship later in the year? All things considered, it's allegedly the case that those countermeasures won't shield these chips against another newly discovered Spectre flaw.
Recently issued the official confession that there is a new strain of Spectre-Variant 4, known as speculative Store Bypass – which use similar vulnerabilities to the current variations, Due to the fact that Intel noted it utilizes an alternate technique to crack into the sensitive information held in computer memory.
What's more, as per sources who addressed Threatpost, the previously mentioned shields which Intel is actualizing may defend against Specter Variants 2 and 3, yet not this fourth incarnation.
There may likewise be further twists along these kinds of theoretical execution side channel vulnerabilities, later on, the sources additionally noted (which is exactly why Microsoft, for one, as of late commenced a noteworthy bug bounty program with huge prizes for the individuals who flag up these issues).
At any rate, Intel isn't leaving processors unprotected against Variant 4, undoubtedly, despite whether it turns out to be the situation that the new consolidated silicon-level countermeasures aren't ready to protect against V4.
The issue with this fix is, dissimilar to prepared in protection, there's a performance cost to pay, much the same as past Meltdown and Spectre patches. Intel estimates that to be a slow down of around 2% to 8% based on SYSmark and various benchmarks, obviously, mileage will unquestionably vary from system to system.
As has been the situation previously, also, you may see all the more an inconvenient impact in case you're running an earlier version of Windows (i.e. pre-Windows 10).
Strangely, Intel will convey this Variant 4 fix as an optional measure, and it will really be set to off by default. That means users will need to enable protection if they so wish, or carry on regardless and avoid any performance hit, with the potential danger of being abused down the line.