You rely on secure microcontrollers to protect your designs from reverse engineering, tampering, and side-channel attacks. So you may be wondering: Are they safe from Meltdown and Spectre? Maxim's DeepCover secure microcontrollers are unaffected by these major chip vulnerabilities. Also safe are the company's USIP PRO secure microcontrollers based on MIPS processors and the MAXQ family of RISC microcontrollers. The common aspect that has protected these ICs is that they are not based on processor platforms that utilize speculative execution.
Speculative execution helps speed up performance of computer systems. However, attackers have found a way to see what happens inside the speculative window and, thus, manipulate the system. So, operating system developers and chipmakers are issuing patches and updates. Meltdown impacts only Intel processors. Spectre, on the other hand, affects Intel as well as AMD and Arm processors. Fortunately, the Arm processors on which the DeepCover secure microcontrollers are based are not impacted by the chip flaws.
For more details, read "Secure Microcontrollers Safe from Spectre and Meltdown Flaws" by two of Maxim's embedded security experts, Yann Loisel and Stephane Di Vito.
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