Straight Line Speculation Vulnerability - 2025.1 English - UG1186

Libmetal and OpenAMP User Guide (UG1186)

Document ID
UG1186
Release Date
2025-05-29
Version
2025.1 English

In 2020 Arm announced CVE-2020-13844 (https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-updates/speculative-processor-vulnerability) which allows malevolent code to obtain secret data via a similar mechanism to Spectre. This vulnerability does not affect the Cortex R5 used in the AMD UltraScale™ and AMD Versal™ device RPUs, and also does not affect the Cortex-A53 used in UltraScale+ devices.

The mitigation for this vulnerability is to add the compiler option "-mharden-sls=all" to the build flags for the open-amp and libmetal libraries, and to the build flags for any application which is linked to them. This results in 2-5% larger executable code and probably a slight performance decrease.

Note: This compiler option is only available in 2022.2 and after.