CVE-2026-23519 — cmov

Summary

thumbv6m-none-eabi (Cortex M0, M0+ and M1) compiler emits non-constant time assembly when using cmovnz (portable version). I did not found any other target with the same behaviour but I did not go through all targets supported by Rust.

Details

It seems that, during mask computation, an LLVM optimisation pass is detecting that bitnz is returning 0 or 1, that can be interpreted as a boolean. This intermediate value is not masked by a call to black_box and thus the subsequent .wrapping_sub(1) can be interpreted as a conditional bitwise conditional not.

PoC

This is an attempt at having a minimal faulty code. In a library crate with an up-to-date cmov as only dependency, the content of src/lib.rs is:

#![no_std]
use cmov::Cmov;

#[inline(never)]
pub fn test_ct_cmov(a: &mut u8, b: u8, c: u8) {
    a.cmovnz(&b, c);
}

The resulting assembly emitted (shown using cargo asm --release --target thumbv6m-none-eabi that uses cargo-show-asm):

.section .text.not_ct::test_ct_cmov,"ax",%progbits
	.globl	not_ct::test_ct_cmov
	.p2align	1
	.type	not_ct::test_ct_cmov,%function
	.code	16
	.thumb_func
not_ct::test_ct_cmov:
	.fnstart
	.cfi_sections .debug_frame
	.cfi_startproc
	.save	{r7, lr}
	push {r7, lr}
	.cfi_def_cfa_offset 8
	.cfi_offset lr, -4
	.cfi_offset r7, -8
	.setfp	r7, sp
	add r7, sp, #0
	.cfi_def_cfa_register r7
	.pad	#8
	sub sp, #8
	movs r3, #0
	lsls r2, r2, #24
	bne .LBB0_2
	mvns r3, r3
.LBB0_2:
	ldrb r2, [r0]
	str r3, [sp, #4]
	str r3, [sp]
	mov r3, sp
	@APP
	@NO_APP
	ldr r3, [sp]
	bics r1, r3
	ands r2, r3
	adds r1, r2, r1
	strb r1, [r0]
	add sp, #8
	pop {r7, pc}

The non-constant time assembly is:

    bne  .LBB0_2
    mvns r3, r3
.LBB0_2:

Impact

The exact impact is unclear, especially since cmov clearly warns users that the portable version is best-effort.