Intel's open letter to technology industry leaders

By Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel Corporation

After announcing potential security issues from Google Project Zero last week, Intel continued to work closely with our partners to restore confidence in the security of our customers' data as quickly as possible. As I noted in my CES comments this week, the degree of collaboration across the industry has been remarkable. I am very proud of how we came together and I would like to thank everyone for the extraordinary collaboration. In particular, we want to thank the Google Project Zero team for practicing responsible disclosure, creating the opportunity for the industry to address these new issues in a coordinated manner.

As this process unfolds, I want to make clear Intel's commitments to our customers. This is our promise:

1.Urgency with client: by January 15, we will have issued updates for at least 90% of Intel CPUs introduced in the past five years, with updates for the rest of these CPUs available by the end of January. Next, we will focus our efforts on issuing updates for older products as prioritized by our customers.
 
2.Transparent and clear communications: as we deploy software and firmware manuals, we’re also learning a lot. We know that the impact on performance varies widely, based on the specific workload, platform configuration and mitigation technique. We are committed to providing frequent progress reports on patch progress, performance data and other information, which can be found at Intel.com.
 
3.Continuous security guarantee: the safety of our customers is a permanent priority and not an isolated situation. To strengthen the security of the entire industry, we are committed to publicly identifying important vulnerabilities by following responsible disclosure rules, and we are also committed to working with the industry to share hardware innovations that will accelerate the industry's progress in dealing with attacks . We are also committed to adding incremental funds for academic and independent research on potential security threats.

Ultimately, the important thing is that continuous collaboration will create faster and more effective approaches to restoring customer confidence in the security of their data. This is what we all want and we are striving to achieve.