As per the report from The Register, a vulnerability in Intel CPU would allow malicious individuals to access areas of the computer that shouldn’t be available to anybody.
The more serious issue is that this bug is applicable for every computer using Intel Chip made in the last 10 years!! This in turn has had a positive effect on its only rival AMD whose price increased by 6% when trading opened today.
The bug will be fixed by a security patch by the company we assume but as per the report that patch could hit the performance of the computer very badly.
Report Excerpts:
These KPTI patches move the kernel into a completely separate address space, so it’s not just invisible to a running process, it’s not even there at all. Really, this shouldn’t be needed, but clearly there is a flaw in Intel’s silicon that allows kernel access protections to be bypassed in some way.
The downside to this separation is that it is relatively expensive, time-wise, to keep switching between two separate address spaces for every system call and for every interrupt from the hardware. These context switches do not happen instantly, and they force the processor to dump cached data and reload information from memory. This increases the kernel’s overhead and slows down the computer.
Your Intel-powered machine will run slower as a result.
The complete details of the bug are not revealed but as per the above it affects the Kernel memory of the Intel chip.It looks like a normal program could have access to the protected Kernel memory which means exposing personal information like passwords and accessing confidential parts of OS .
Intel has not come out with a statement yet but if the reports are anywhere near severe we should expect updates in the near future and also on details of the issue.