When the news broke last week of two side-channel attacks – Spectre and Meltdown – Apple stated that it had already released mitigations for Meltdown in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2, and that fixes for Spectre would follow. Today the firm has released a trio of security updates aimed at protecting Safari and WebKit against the Spectre attack. The three updates make changes to iOS, macOS and the Safari browser itself.

As Chris Swan noted in his report for InfoQ over the weekend, browsers are a particular target for the Spectre vulnerability since they can potentially be exploited via JavaScript running in the browser. Similar patches have already been released for Chrome and Firefox.

As is typical, Apple provides few details beyond making it clear which vulnerabilities are targeted, but the firm does thank the researchers responsible for finding the bugs, including Jann Horn of Google Project Zero, in the release notes.

Read full news article on InfoQ