Intel Microcode Boot Loader allows you to easily protect your old CPU from Specter.
One user has managed to develop a tool, the Intel Microcode Boot Loader, which allows protecting older Intel processors against the Specter vulnerability, especially when they are installed and running on older Microsoft Windows operating systems, for which Microsoft Windows updates are no longer being released. usual way, such as Windows XP, 7, 8 and 8.1.
Despite being an important vulnerability, Specter has not been treated as such, neither by motherboard manufacturers nor by Microsoft. It is true that Intel has released microcode updates for processors as old as the Intel Sandy Bridge, but motherboard manufacturers have not released the corresponding BIOS revisions in which this new microcode will be implemented for those very old processors.
Even more problematic is the fact that the microcode updates that exist for Windows have only been released for Windows 10. All of this leaves many users with these older processors and operating systems completely exposed to attacks that use this vulnerability.
Intel Microcode Boot Loader runs from a flash drive
Intel Microcode Boot Loader is a tool that has been developed by the user Eran “Regeneration” Badit that allows you to update the microcode of these old Intel processors using a pendrive, regardless of the version of the Windows operating system in which the software is running. processor. To do this, it has used the Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) tool and the Syslinux bootloader to detect the old processor model installed on the motherboard, and apply the corresponding update. The Intel Microcode Boot Loader program allows you to protect processors as old as the old Intel Nehalem and Westmere.
How to run the program
In order to run the Intel Microcode Boot Loader program, the first thing we will need is a pendrive formatted in the FAT32 file system and with at least 25 MB of free space. Then, we must download the program and save it on our hard drive. With these steps done, we will unzip the zip file and record it inside the flash drive, where we will execute the “install.exe” program, which will make our flash drive bootable.
The next step is to enter the BIOS of our motherboard and configure the boot options so that it always boots from the flash drive that we have just created. Be careful, if your motherboard uses a UEFI type BIOS, you must configure it to boot from Legacy type systems. Once these changes are made in the BIOS, you save them, and when the computer boots the next time, the program will analyze the CPU_ID of the processor and install the corresponding microcode that will protect it from the Specter vulnerability.
At the moment, the Intel Microcode Boot Loader program contains the microcode belonging to 392 Intel processors, all of which are stored in the “boot/mcub” folder. This has been done like this, in case in the future it is decided to include a greater number of microcodes, to support a greater number of processors.
The only drawback of the Intel Microcode Boot Loader program is that it always has to be executed in the same way every time we want to start our computer, which will force us to leave the flash drive where we have the unzipped program permanently fixed. in the computer. But, on the other hand, it is the only solution that exists right now in the case of old processors and operating systems, so that they are protected against Specter, since neither motherboard manufacturers nor Microsoft itself have done anything to alleviate the problem in this scenario, which is not so far-fetched either.
