Pivoting from Crowdstrike to electrocuted Intel processors, and the PKFail serious security vulnerability, July's been a tough month for PC users

Computers are complex beasts, comprising a huge hodgepodge of integrated technologies that are at a very small scale as well. It's not magic that they work together, but we tend to take the huge engineering effort required to make it so for granted.

It's when IT systems fail that we notice and pay attention to that underlying engineering complexity, like during the recent "Crowdstruck" disaster, which took out 8.5 million or thereabouts Windows computers this month.

A relatively simple additional testing step, namely putting the Crowdstrike Falcon malware sensor code update on an actual PC would seem to have been the way to avoid putting millions of Windows computers into a blue screen of death boot up loop, but that wasn't done. Oops.

Speaking of PCs, this month Intel's in the headlines for the wrong reasons. Intel is the micro electronics company that kicked off the PC revolution many decades ago, creating the small but crucial parts that are the "brains" of computers, namely the processors.

Over the years, processors have become massively more advanced with billions of transistors adding functionality that's pretty amazing. The way to make the processors has shrunk, and with the electronics inside them now at atom-scale. 

That as anyone can imagine is really complicated stuff, and things can go wrong. Which they have with Intel's most recent processors. 

Over the last few weeks reports have cropped up about Intel's Core 13th and 14th Generation desktop processors being unstable and crashing. Nobody knew why, but eventually Intel figured out what's causing the issue:

"Based on extensive analysis of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors returned to us due to instability issues, we have determined that elevated operating voltage is causing instability issues in some 13th/14th Gen desktop processors. Our analysis of returned processors confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor," an Intel employee wrote.

There is a fix coming up mid August but it appears the elevated voltage in the processors can damage them. If your computer has started crashing because of the Core processor problem, it could be that the Intel part is irreversibly damaged.

Intel has said it will replace the faulty processors, but it's a huge pain for users and exactly the kind of bad publicity no tech company would ever want.

The elder geeks of this site may recall the Intel F00F bug, leaking motherboard capacitors due industrial espionage leading to bad electrolyte formulation, and other such fun in the past.

But wait, there's more hardware pain ahead (potentially).

Security vendor Binarly, a new name that auto corrupt hates, has published a long and detailed analysis on a vulnerability they've given a catchy name, PKFail. You need that in the security biz, catchy names for vulnerabilities.

PKFail is obscure stuff for most users, but it is to do with a fundamental part of computers, namely starting them up. Without going into too much technical detail, because of low-level malware, it's important to ensure that computers start up safely so a feature called Secure Boot was developed.

It's not a reference to footwear, but in computerese, you bootstrap devices when you start them up. Pulling them up by the bootstraps, ergo, booting them up. Thinking about it, booting a computer sounds weird but anyway, that's now accepted usage so let's not dwell on it further.

Anyway, Secure Boot is a way to check the integrity of a fundamental part of PCs, to ensure it's not compromised by malware, using cryptographic keys. It's massively important.

What Binarly discovered was that the Secure Boot system on motherboards (the circuit boards that for example the above mentioned Intel processors are mounted onto) could be in jeopardy.

It appears an unknown vendor accidentally published a legitimate cryptographic key used by the Secure Boot system, on the Github open source code repository.

Now there are concerns that motherboards from 10 vendors, with 813 models in fact, are affected by the leak. That means Secure Boot could be bypassed, as bad people are able to use that legit digital key to sign malicious code to verify it's fine to load when it really isn't. 

Several of the vendors potentially affected are big household PC brands, and if this is as bad as it seems to yours truly, fixing the issue will be involved to say the least. Fingers crossed, PC vendors will take notice and issue updates soon.