14 DAY TRIAL // Purism's response to the Meltdown and Spectre security exploits that put billions of devices at risk of attacks came today in the form of a press release with details on the patches for its PureOS operating system.
If you own a Librem laptop from Purism, chances are it will get a patch to mitigate the Meltdown hardware exploit. The patch, as expected, consists of a kernel update, which users will have to install from PureOS's software repositories and make sure they reboot their computers for the patch to be correctly installed.
"Purism’s PureOS, a Free Software Foundation endorsed distribution, is releasing a patch to stop the Meltdown attack, with thanks to the quick and effective actions of the upstream Linux kernel development team," says Todd Weaver, Founder and CEO of Purism in the press release.
More patches are coming to PureOS to mitigate Spectre attacks
Purism says that it will continue to release patches against any variants of the Spectre exploit, which is harder to fix than the Meltdown vulnerability, and recommends users keeping their PureOS installations up-to-date at all times by making sure they install all the latest updates the company will release shortly.
Purism remains dedicated to continuing to advance security in hardware by implementing various combination of techniques that lets them provide Librem and PureOS users with the best defensive strategies to mitigate any future security exploits that might be uncovered.
To achieve this goal, the company says it will include TPM (Trusted Platform Module) support in all their Librem laptops, while they continue their progress towards a turn-key TPM+Heads solution, which will be fully supported in the next revisions of both the Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops.
Meanwhile, Purism will continue to work hard in 2018 on its Librem 5 security- and privacy-focused smartphone, which was successfully funded on Kickstarter with over $2,2 million. The device is slated for release in early 2019 and will run only Free/Libre and Open Source software on top of a GNU/Linux operating system.