• Born: Is my browser vulnerable to Spectre attacks?

    Posted on January 11, 2018 at 09:51 CST by • Comment in the Forums

    Günter Born has an important recap of the the test website xlab.tencent.com, which has a tool that can check to see if your browser is currently susceptible to Spectre attacks.

    The tool is from Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, which is part of Tencent, one of the largest companies in Asia. The Xuanwu Lab is well-known in antimalware circles.

    I ran a quick check on both of my go-to browsers, Firefox 57.0.4 (64-bit) and Chrome 63.0.3239.132 (Official Build) (64-bit). Both of them came up with “Not vulnerable.”

    That’s a comforting, if ambiguous, determination. As the Tencent site says:

    However, if the result is NOT VULNERABLE, it doesn’t mean your browser is absolutely not vulnerable because there might be other unknown attacking methods.

    Which is something of a triple (quadruple?) negative, but I surmise that Firefox and Chrome aren’t susceptible to the currently published Spectre vulnerabilities.

    A quick check of the latest IE and Chrome on my Win10 1703 machine turned up Not Vulnerable as well.

    Martin Brinkmann on ghacks.net ran a similar set of tests. He says that Google Chrome Stable, Opera Stable and Vivaldi Stable all turn up Vulnerable.

    Your mileage may vary.

    Other ,
DON'T MISS OUT!
Subscribe to the Free Newsletter
We promise not to spam you. Unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

View the Forum

  • Recent Replies
  • My Replies
  • My Active Topics
  • New Posts in the Last day
  • Private Messages
  • Knowledge Base
  • How to use the Forums
  • All Forums

    • Recent Topics

    My Profile

    April 2025
    S M T W T F S
     12345
    6789101112
    13141516171819
    20212223242526
    27282930  

    Remembering Woody

     

    Want to Advertise in the free newsletter? How about a gift subscription in honor of a birthday? Send an email to sb@askwoody.com to ask how.

    Mastodon profile for DefConPatch
    Mastodon profile for AskWoody

     

    Home • About • FAQ • Posts & Privacy • Forums • My Account
    Register • Free Newsletter • Plus Membership • Gift Certificates • MS-DEFCON Alerts

    Copyright ©2004-2025 by AskWoody Tech LLC. All Rights Reserved.