Within a week after the Meltdown and Spectre exploits revealed, the first Apple Spectre patches were introduced. And Apple has finally released their next slew of patches that will help protect Apple computers against Meltdown and Spectre.

There has been some confusion about what was “fixed” in which patch. In this article, we will share with you exactly mitigations were introduced in which OS X update. As usual, we will update this article, as and when new Apple Spectre or Meltdown patches are released.

 

The Apple Spectre + Meltdown Patches

macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 Supplemental Update

Date Of Introduction : 8 January 2018
Operating System Patched : macOS 10.13 High Sierra
GPZ Variant Addressed : Spectre 1 and 2 (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715)

The first known update was the macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 Supplemental Update. It introduced a number of mitigations against the two Spectre variants (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715). Specifically, several security improvements were made to Safari and WebKit.

After updating, Safari will be upgraded to version 11.0.2 (13604.4.7.1.6) or version 11.0.2 (13604.4.7.10.6).

 

Security Update 2018-001 Sierra

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Date Of Introduction : 23 January 2018
Operating System Patched : macOS 10.12 Sierra
GPZ Variant Addressed : Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754)

This security update patched all versions of macOS Sierra against the Meltdown exploit (CVE-2017-5754).

 

Security Update 2018-001 El Capitan

Date Of Introduction : 23 January 2018
Operating System Patched : OS X 10.11 El Capitan
GPZ Variant Addressed : Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754)

This security update patched all versions of OS X El Capitan against the Meltdown exploit (CVE-2017-5754).

 

Outstanding Apple Spectre + Meltdown Patches

From what we understand, these are the likely Apple Spectre and Meltdown patches that are still outstanding, and will eventually be released :

1. A Meltdown patch for macOS High Sierra
2. Spectre mitigation patches for macOS Sierra and OS X El Capitan
3. EFI firmware updates for various Mac computers

We will update this article, as and when new Apple Spectre or Meltdown patches are released.

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