Essential Phone releases Meltdown and Spectre fixes

Essential confirmed on Twitter that it is rolling out fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre security flaws as part of the January security updates for the Essential Phone. These will be available to those running the current stable release and not to those on the Oreo beta release. However, the final Oreo release will include these fixes. Essential did not comment on when the final Oreo update will be released.

Meltdown and Spectre are names of two major security flaws that were uncovered recently. Both are techniques that can allow a user process to read kernel memory and access sensitive information. Meltdown largely affects Intel x86 processors from the last decade or so and some ARM-based processors. Spectre affects almost all modern processors. Companies have already started issuing patches for both but it is speculated that these will reduce performance in some instances.

#Android #AndroidOreo #Essential #EssentialPhone #AndyRubin #Meltdown #Spectre #Promote