Spectre & Meltdown Vulnerability
and Performance Status
Vulnerable to Meltdown: YES!
Vulnerable to Spectre: YES!
Performance: GOOD
(full details below)
In early 2018 the PC industry was rocked by the revelation that common processor design features, widely used to increase the performance of modern PCs, could be abused to create critical security vulnerabilities. The industry quickly responded, and is responding, to these Meltdown and Spectre threats by updating operating systems, motherboard BIOSes and CPU firmware.
Protection from these two significant vulnerabilities requires updates to every system's hardware-its BIOS which reloads updated processor firmware-and its operating system-to use the new processor features. To further complicate matters, newer processors contain features to minimize the performance impact of these important security improvements. But older processors, lacking these newer features, will be significantly burdened and system performance will suffer under some workloads.
This InSpectre utility was designed to clarify every system's current situation so that appropriate measures can be taken to update the system's hardware and software for maximum security and performance.
This system's present situation:
This 64-bit version of Windows is not aware of either the Spectre or Meltdown problems. Since Intel processors are vulnerable to both of these attacks, this system will be vulnerable to these attacks until its operating system has been updated to handle and prevent these attacks.
This system's hardware has not been updated with new features required to allow its operating system to protect against the Spectre vulnerabilities and/or to minimize their impact upon the system's performance. (Protection from the Meltdown vulnerability does not require BIOS or processor updates.)
This system's Intel processor does not provide high-performance protection from the Meltdown vulnerability. The use of Meltdown protection on this system will incur some corresponding performance penalty.
This system is not currently providing any protection against the Meltdown vulnerability. Either the operating system is unaware of this problem (which can be resolved by any operating system) or the operating system's protection has been deliberately disabled.
Due to the potential performance impact of these vulnerability protections, which may be particularly burdensome on older hardware and operating systems that cannot be updated, either one or both of these protections may be disabled with Windows registry settings. This system's "protection disable" is currently set as follows:
The system's registry is configured to enable both of the Spectre and Meltdown protections. Within the bounds of any limitations described above, Windows will work with the system's processor to prevent the exploitation of these vulnerabilities.
Guidance & Observations
Since this version of Windows is not fully aware of both of these security threats, if possible you should consider updating to a newer version which is fully aware. There are versions of Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 which are fully aware... even at a possible cost in system performance.
When enabled and active, both of these vulnerability protections come at some cost in system performance, and Meltdown attack protection may be quite expensive on older systems or under versions of Windows where Microsoft has not bothered to implement high-speed solutions. If this system's performance is more important than security, either or both of the vulnerability protections can be disabled to obtain greater performance.
When InSpectre is run with elevated administrative privilege, each button below toggles its respective protection on or off. Any changes will take effect after the system is restarted. Each button will be disabled if its protection is not available to be changed.
For more information see GRC's InSpectre web page
Copyright © 2018 by Gibson Research Corporation