Later this year, hardware-level protection will be applied to data centers and PC products.

In order to address the vulnerability discovered by the Google Project Zero team earlier this year, Intel and the technology industry faced a major challenge. Thousands of colleagues throughout the industry have made unremitting efforts to ensure that we are able to deliver on our common primary commitment: to protect customers and their data. With humility, I am sincerely grateful to the people and colleagues around the world for their commitment and hard work. And I’m convinced that when companies need help urgently, companies, even competitors, will work together to cope. xc18v04vq44i

However, there is still a lot of work to do. As the security situation continues to evolve, we know that there will always be new threats. This prompted me to draft a pledge to “safeguard safety first” in January. Intel has always been very concerned about security, and now, more than ever, we are sticking to the principles I have stated in these commitments: customer-first urgency, transparent and timely communication, and ongoing security.

Today, I would like to provide some updates to illustrate our continued progress in fulfilling these commitments. First of all, we have now released microcode updates for all Intel products released in the past five years in order to protect against the vulnerabilities discovered by Google through the side channel approach. Secondly, I would like to express my appreciation to all industry partners and express my gratitude. They work closely with us to develop and test these updates, and to ensure that these updates have been productized. AT24C16BN-SH-B

These updates are now in place and I encourage everyone to ensure that their systems are always up-to-date. This is one of the simplest ways to achieve lasting protection. I would also like to take this opportunity to share more details about our future defense of these vulnerabilities at the hardware level. This is also my commitment at Intel’s recent earnings conference call.

Vulnerability variant 1 will continue to be addressed through software defenses, and we are currently working on changing the hardware design to further address the other two vulnerabilities. We have redesigned some of the components of the processor to introduce a new level of protection through partitioning, which will prevent both variant 2 and variant 3 of the vulnerability. You can think of this partition as an extra “protection wall” between the application and the user’s privilege level, setting a barrier for intruders.

These changes will be the first to be applied to our next-generation Xeon Extensible Processors (codenamed Cascade Lake) and 8th generation Intel Core processors expected to ship in the second half of 2018. When these new products come out, the key is to ensure that they provide people with the desired performance improvement. Our goal is not only to provide the best performance, but also to provide the safest performance.

However, our work is not yet over. This is not a one-time event but a long-term commitment. We attach great importance to this. Customer first urgency, transparent and timely communication, and continuous security. This is our commitment, my commitment to all Intel employees.