Straight Line Speculation Vulnerability - 2022.1 English

Libmetal and OpenAMP User Guide (UG1186)

Document ID
UG1186
Release Date
2022-06-15
Version
2022.1 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 UltraScale+ and Versal RPUs, and also does not affect the Cortex A53 used in the UltraScale+.

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 will be linked to them. This will result in 2-5% larger executable code and probably a slight performance decrease.

Note: This compiler option is only available in 2022.1 and after.