All Chrome OS Devices Now Protected Against Meltdown
1.5.18 securityweek Safety

The latest version of Chrome OS now keeps all devices protected from Meltdown, Google says.

Available as Chrome OS 66.0.3359.137 (Platform version: 10452.74.0), the new Chrome OS release includes additional patches for the critical processor vulnerability, in addition to various new features and bug fixes.

The Meltdown attack was disclosed in the beginning of 18 alongside another critical CPU bug, Spectre. The two attacks are possible because design flaws in Intel, AMD, ARM and other processors allow malicious programs to bypass memory isolation and access sensitive data.

Google started rolling out Meltdown mitigations in mid-December – before the attacks became public knowledge –, pushing a kernel page-table isolation (KPTI/KAISER) patch to roughly 70 Intel-based Chromebook models from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and others.

Last month, the company released Chrome OS 65 to make the KPTI mitigation against Meltdown available for additional Intel devices with version 3.14 of the kernel.

“Intel devices on 3.8 kernels received the KPTI mitigation against Meltdown with Chrome OS 66. All Chrome OS devices are now protected against Meltdown,” Josafat Garcia, Google Chrome, explains in a blog post.

The updated platform iteration is already rolling out to users and should arrive on all devices within days.

Late last week, Google also released an update for the Chrome browser to patch a critical security vulnerability in it, less than two weeks after Chrome 66 landed in the stable channel.

Tracked as CVE-18-6118, the critical issue was reported by security researcher Ned Williamson on April 12. The vulnerability, a use-after-free in Media Cache, can be exploited by a malicious actor to cause denial of service and possibly execute arbitrary code.

Unfortunately, Google hasn’t provided specific details on the vulnerability itself, nor on its CVSS rating, but it did reveal that the researcher received a $10,500 reward for the discovery.

Released as version 66.0.3359.139 and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users, the updated browser iteration patches a total of three security flaws.

The remaining two vulnerabilities were found internally and Google hasn’t released details on them either.