An Exploitive Opportunity

July 11 2018 · 2 minute read · by NavJack27

In tonight’s news; more Intel exploits are being found. I’m not going to be talking about the exploits here because people more educated then I am in this sort of thing will have covered it already. What I do want to talk about is the opportunity that motherboard manufacturers have right now. The way we get our microcode updates is mainly through UEFI updates. In the past you’d be lucky to get UEFI updates even half a year after a motherboard came out. Now their hand is forced to package up new updates that just include the new microcode, but it doesn’t need to be this way. There are tons of improvements that could be made just while they happen to be in there. Even small things like a clean-up of wording would be welcome in these UEFI updates. I’d like to see actual improvements in certain behaviors or power tables and things like that. I’m sure there isn’t all that much they could change or fix but there’s got to be some bugs reported that just get ignored. A good example of this is the sensor bug on my Gigabyte z370 Aorus Gaming 7.

Basically, the ite8686e is messed up and a good fix would be for the motherboard to reinitialize the sensor chip every so often.

I’m sure other boards have similar issues and quirks that users would very much appreciate seeing fixed along with these security microcode updates.