14 DAY TRIAL // Purism, the computer technology company behind the privacy-focused, Linux-based Librem laptops and the upcoming smartphone, released patches for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities.
The company was one of the first Linux OEMs and OS vendor to announce that it's working on addressing both the Meltdown and Spectre security exploits on his Linux laptops. Meltdown and Spectre have been unearthed in early January and they are two severe hardware bugs that put billions of devices at risk of attacks.
It took a bit longer than expected, but the patches for Meltdown and one variant of the Spectre security vulnerability, which is harder to fix then Meltdown, are now available for all Librem 13 and Librem 15 users using the PureOS Linux operating system. Purism says that these patches will also be available in all new Librem laptops.
"Purism has released a patch for Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754, aka variant 3) as part of PureOS, and includes this latest PureOS image as part of all new Librem laptop shipments. Purism is also providing a microcode update for Intel processors to address Spectre variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715)," said Kyle Rankin.
Here's how to protect your Librem laptops against Meltdown and Spectre
Purism urges all Librem laptops users to update their PureOS installations right now to protect them against the Meltdown security vulnerability. All you have to do is to run the Software Update utility and install all available updates, especially for the Linux kernel, which was bumped to version 4.14.12.
To also protect your Librem laptop against the Spectre exploit, you must install the latest proprietary CPU microcode firmware update from Intel by following the instructions provided by Purism. Once you've installed the new kernel version and CPU microcode update, please reboot your computers.
Purism also released new installation mediums of its PureOS Linux operating system, which includes these patches by default. These images can only be used for new deployments of the OS, and the company assured its customers that all new Librem laptops are protected against Meltdown and Spectre.
