The doors to CES 2018, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas, have opened with lots of news but also a few question marks. Certainly, in such a review can not go unnoticed the affair of the Meltdown and Spectre bugs and the very CEO of Intel, Brian Krzanich, in his speech yesterday promised that by the end of January the recently produced processors will be updated to solve the serious security problems that have emerged. However, he didn’t go into details about the solutions (patches) proposed so far and especially regarding their impact on the capacity of the processors.
Let’s take a look today at the measures Apple is taking to contain this issue. Since the beginning Apple itself has confirmed that all devices released so far based on iOS and macOS, i.e. iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook and iMac, are affected by the two bugs, and has worked to implement first of all fixes for the Meltdown vulnerability with the operating systems iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2 (update: also macOS 10.12 Sierra and OS X 10.11 El Capitan) and tvOS 11.2, then released updates for macOS High Sierra, iOS11and Safariparticularly targeted at the Spectre vulnerability. Apple Watches remain immune to Meltdown, but not Spectre.
As in the Intel case, Apple reassured users by stating that so far there have been no known incidents related to exploitation of these flaws by malicious parties, while also recommending installing software and apps only from official sources such as App Stores. Unfortunately, and here’s the sore spot to point out, Apple talked about operating system versions not being installable on many products still in use, especially iOS: so it’s unclear if the company will release fixes for older iOS. As for the performance drop, Apple states that the fixes released for Meltdown did not lead to a measurable reduction in macOS and iOS performance, and a similar outcome or at least a minimal slowdown is expected for Spectre as well.
News is being updated.
Sara Avanzi