Update on Spectre and Meltdown – Part 2

27.04.2018

Owners of older PCs with Windows 10 are currently waiting in vain for BIOS updates. These are required by the CPU to protect Windows 10 against Spectre (variant 2) – but are not provided. An optional Windows update now provides a remedy.

Windows update KB4090007 for Windows 10

Hoping for BIOS updates for Intel processors from 2013 and 2014 has come to an end. The latest version of the optional Windows update KB4090007 from 24.04.2018 not only brings microcode updates for Coffee Lake (Core i-8000), Kaby Lake (i-7000) and Skylake (i-6000), but also for Broadwell (i-5000) and Haswell (i-4000). The update is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 10 - but can still only be downloaded from the Windows Update Catalog via an unsecured http connection. However, Windows 10 computers with Intel Atom processors still require BIOS updates.

The update also solves another problem: BIOS updates with supposedly new microcode updates have been released for some systems since December 2017, but the PowerShell script Get-SpeculationControl still reports no BTI protection.

Meltdown patches for Windows 7

Microsoft does not provide microcode updates for Windows 7 via Windows Update - BIOS updates are still required here. At the end of March, there were serious problems with the patches for the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 against the Meltdown vulnerability, which became known as "Total Meltdown". However, anyone who has applied the patches from the beginning (early March) is protected against Total Meltdown.

A PoC (Proof of Concept) has been published to ensure that you are protected against Total Meltdown.

Source: heise

Read the first part on Spectre and Meltdown

Read the first update on Spectre and Meltdown