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Xbox One “mitigates against… recent chip-related security vulnerabilities”

Meltdown and Spectre, massive security vulnerabilities plaguing most PCs and Macs built after 1995, will not impact Xbox One, Microsoft recently confirmed.

For those unaware, it was recently confirmed vulnerabilities exist in modern Intel and AMD CPUs and will force a redesign of kernel software in all major operating systems including Windows, macOS, iOS, Linux and more.

According to Google’s security engineers, Meltdown is the more serious exploit of the two, breaking “the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system. Meltdown impacts most modern Intel processors, though some ARM cores are also at risk.

Spectre impacts AMD and ARM processors alongside Intel CPUs and “tricks other applications into accessing arbitrary locations in their memory.” For more information on both exploits, we point you to a very easy to read primer by PC World.

Now that you’re caught up, Xbox One owners can seemingly rest a bit easier — Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra took to Twitter last week to confirm that “Xbox already mitigates against the recent chip-related security vulnerabilities.”

“Microsoft has been working closely with chip manufacturers to develop and test mitigations to protect our customers,” a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed with Stevivor when asked for more information.

“We’re in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services and released security updates on January 3 to protect Windows customers against vulnerabilities affecting supported hardware chips from Intel, ARM, and AMD. The security architecture of Xbox consoles provide effective mitigations against this type of attack. We have not received any information to indicate that these vulnerabilities have been used to attack our customers.”

While this is great news for Xbox owners, experts believe that security-fixing patches to most operation systems will reduce performance across Intel CPU-based machines by around 5-30%. Patches are being rolled out now.

Thanks, Beau.


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Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.