Be more specific about what compiler options we consider legitimate

Signed-off-by: Gilles Peskine <Gilles.Peskine@arm.com>
This commit is contained in:
Gilles Peskine
2026-02-26 11:44:02 +01:00
parent 778ea0af9b
commit 168ac78034

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@@ -108,7 +108,7 @@ model, they need to be mitigated by physical countermeasures.
Mbed TLS is mostly written in C. We use standard C except with known compilers, so we do not expect compilers to introduce direct vulnerabilities. However, compilers can introduce [timing side channels](#timing-attacks) in code that was intended to be constant-time. Mbed TLS includes countermeasures to try to prevent this. But given the diversity of compilers, compiler options and target platforms, this prevention may not be complete.
We recommend compiling Mbed TLS with commonly used levels of optimizations, such as `-O2` or `-Os`. Higher levels of optimization such as `-O3` or `-Oz` are likely to be safe but are less scrutinized. We do not recommend using less vetted optimization options unless your system is physically isolated.
We recommend compiling Mbed TLS with commonly used levels of optimizations, such as `-O2` or `-Os`. We will generally treat exploitable timing side channels as a vulnerability if they appear with a common compiler at a common level of optimization. Higher levels of optimization such as `-O3` or `-Oz` are still likely to be safe but are less scrutinized. We do not recommend using individual options that might introduce data-dependent timing, and we will not try to work around such optimizations if they are not part of a commonly used level.
#### Out-of-scope countermeasures