(9^th June 2025)

Preface: AMD’s Versal™ Adaptive SoCs are used in a wide range of industries, particularly those requiring high-performance, low-latency processing and flexibility, such as data centers, wireless networking, automotive, aerospace, and defense. Versal chips are also utilized in areas like 5G wireless, advanced driver assist, and even 3D printing.

AMD’s Versal™ Adaptive SoC technology is used in several different chip series, including the Versal AI Edge, Versal AI Core, Versal Prime, Versal Premium, and Versal RF series. These SoCs are designed for a variety of applications, including AI inference, data-intensive workloads, and high-speed communication.

Background: Platform Management Controller (PMC), Platform Loader and Manager (PLM), and boot and configuration are key components in modern embedded systems, especially in Xilinx Versal ACAPs and similar platforms.

Key Steps Illustrated:

1.BootROM loads PL –  Initial boot step from non-volatile memory.

2.PLM starts running – Executes on the MicroBlaze inside the PMC.

3.PLM authenticates and decrypts partitions – Uses hardware accelerators in the PMC for cryptographic operations.

4.PLM configures programmable logic – Loads and configures the Adaptive Engines and other programmable resources.

Remark: To understand the process, please refer to the attached diagram.

Vulnerability details: In Versal™ Adaptive SoC devices, the Platform Loader and Manager (PLM) implements runtime (post-boot) software services that can allow a remote processor to command the PLM to execute cryptographic operations – including AES, SHA3, RSA, ECDSA – using the hardened cryptographic accelerators, eFUSE and BBRAM reads and writes, reloading PDIs, and reading back the FPGA on behalf of the remote processor.

A potential vulnerability exists with commanding these runtime services, in that the memory passed with the command to execute the services is not checked by the PLM to verify that the requesting processor has access to the memory space.

Official announcement: Please refer to the link for details – https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-8010.html

Preface: The Valhall family of Mali GPUs uses the same top-level architecture as the previous generation Bifrost GPUs. The Valhall family uses a unified shader core architecture. Arm’s 5th generation GPU architecture, on the other hand, is a type of GPU architecture that is designed for visual computing, especially on mobile devices, and includes features like deferred vertex shading and hardware-based ray tracing. It is a part of the Arm Mali or Immortalis GPU family.

Background: Arm’s Mali GPUs are closely related to the Valhall architecture. Valhall is Arm’s fourth-generation architecture for Mali GPUs, and the Mali-G77 is the first high-end GPU to adopt this architecture. Valhall improves on previous generations of architectures such as Bifrost with a simplified, compiler-friendly instruction set and better compatibility with newer APIs such as Vulkan. The architecture also allows for configuration of the number of shader cores and the size of the L2 cache.

WebGL (Web Graphics Library) and WebGPU (Web Graphics Processing Unit) are both JavaScript APIs that allow web developers to use a computer’s GPU to render 3D graphics and perform computations within a web browser. WebGPU is a newer and more powerful API than WebGL, designed to provide better performance and support for modern GPUs.

Vulnerability details: A non-privileged user process can perform valid GPU processing operations, including via WebGL or WebGPU, to access outside of buffer bounds. This issue has been assigned the identifier CVE-2025-1246.

Affected Products – Bifrost GPU Userspace Driver

CVE-2025-1246: All versions from r18p0-r49p3, r50p0-r51p0 Valhall GPU Userspace Driver

CVE-2025-1246: All versions from r28p0-r49p3, r50p0-r54p0 Arm 5th Gen GPU Architecture Userspace Driver

CVE-2025-1246: All versions from r41p0-r49p3, r50p0-r54p0

Recommendations – These issues have been fixed in the following versions:

Bifrost GPU Userspace Driver – CVE-2025-1246: r49p4, r54p1

Valhall GPU Userspace Driver – CVE-2025-1246: r49p4, r54p1

Arm 5th Gen GPU Architecture Userspace Driver – CVE-2025-1246: r49p4, r54p1

Official announcement: Please see the link for – detailshttps://developer.arm.com/documentation/110466/1-0