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The recent announcement of critical flaws in CPUs produced by Intel, ARM and AMD – known as Meltdown and Spectre – has disrupted the computing world. Meltdown is known to affect certain Intel processors, enabling attackers to gain a copy of the entire kernel address space, including any data stored in memory at the time of the attack. Alternatively, Spectre, which exploits a flaw in processor design to trick an application into leaking information stored in memory, is believed to affect virtually all modern processors, including Intel, AMD, and ARM chips.

Although there is no evidence that Meltdown or Spectre have yet been exploited to steal data, the vulnerability could result in attackers gaining access to sensitive information in memory.

Over the past number of days, WinMagic has applied and tested the Microsoft Windows patch (http://www2.winmagic.com/e/17502/t-processor-bug-windows-10-fix/fd8r33/536741390) in our lab on late model laptops. We tested both initial conversion (encryption) and heavy I/O on an encrypted system. We found that that SecureDoc continued to operate correctly with a 10% to 20% increase in conversion times, and a small (~5%) decrease in drive I/O throughput once the patch was applied.

Further to the Microsoft patch testing, we are monitoring developments in the Linux community, and will assess as available.

Important Note: As new information becomes available, this article will be updated as needed.

Reference Info:
For more information regarding both of these vulnerabilities, you can refer to these sites for additional details:

https://meltdownattack.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability)