Canonical Announces Ubuntu Updates to Mitigate Latest Intel Vulnerabilities

As we reported earlier, Intel announced today that several new security vulnerabilities are affecting various of its Intel CPU microarchitectures, as well as associated GPUs. These vulnerabilities are known as TSX Asynchronous Abort (CVE-2019-11135), Intel Processor Machine Check Error (CVE-2018-12207), and Intel i915 graphics hardware vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-0155, CVE-2019-0154). The first security vulnerability, TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA), is related to the previously announced MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) vulnerabilities. However, Canonical’s Alex Murray explains that it only affects Intel processors that support the Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX). As such, the existing MDS mitigations will also mitigate TAA.