>itwire.com
Disclosure of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, which affect mainly Intel CPUs, was handled "in an incredibly bad way" by both Intel and Google, the leader of the OpenBSD project Theo de Raadt claims.
"Only Tier-1 companies received advance information, and that is not responsible disclosure – it is selective disclosure," De Raadt told iTWire in response to queries. "Everyone below Tier-1 has just gotten screwed."
Details of the bugs were published on the Web on 3 January though there had been an understanding that disclosure would only take place on 9 January, that being the day when Microsoft is scheduled to release its monthly security updates.
The reason for this is because the bugs mainly affect Intel CPUs and Windows is the operating system that has the biggest share of such processors.
Google justified breaking the embargo, saying: "We are posting before an originally coordinated disclosure date of January 9, 2018 because of existing public reports and growing speculation in the press and security research community about the issue, which raises the risk of exploitation."
The reason why such bugs had come about was put down by De Raadt to Intel's desire to stay far ahead of the competition; hence it had played "fast and loose".
Meltdown removes the barrier between user applications and sensitive parts of the operating system while Spectre, which is also reportedly found in some AMD and ARM processors, can trick vulnerable applications into leaking the contents of their memory.
