Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon has been quoted as saying that the recent Meltdown and Spectre security flaws are not concerns for the company and the mobile industry as such. Meltdown security flaw affects all Intel chip processors, while Spectre is believed to impact all modern processors. However, according to Qualcomm’s president, the mobile ecosystem will not be affected as the patches are already available.
According to TechCrunch, which reported the Qualcomm President’s quotes, Amon said, “There are a few things that are unique about the mobile ecosystem. Users download from an app store. On top of that, the impact you had on Android and ARM — we had patches that got released as early as December to some OEMs.” The report also adds that according to the Qualcomm President, “this is not an area of concern for us and the mobile ecosystem.”
Google Project Zero team had discovered the vulnerabilities nearly a year back and alerted Intel and other players in the ecosystem. According to Google, a hacker would actually need to be able to run the malicious code on the concerned device, be it the laptop or smartphone, in order to actually exploit any of these vulnerabilities. However, on Android, Google said it has already issued patches for the security problem. The blog post said that all Android devices with the latest security update are protected.
According to Google’s post, the company was “unaware of any successful reproduction of this vulnerability that would allow unauthorised information disclosure on ARM-based Android devices.” Google had also said that supported Nexus and Pixel devices with the latest security update are protected. Qualcomm powers most of the smartphone world, and relies on ARM’s architecture, which according to Google is impacted by the vulnerability.
Meanwhile, Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich acknowledged the Meltdown and Spectre flaws in his keynote address. Intel processors are impacted by both the vulnerabilities. “I want to the thank the industry for coming together to address the recent security research violations, reported as Meltdown and Spectre. The collaboration among so many companies to address this industry-wide issue, across several different processor architectures, has been truly remarkable. Security is job number one for Intel and our industry,” he said during the keynote. He also promised that Intel had pushed updates to 90 per cent of the affected processors and will ensure updates for the remaining by the end of January.
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