Same Chip, Two Walls: TrustZone-M vs RISC-V PMP on the RP2350

TL;DR

The RP2350 has both an Arm Cortex-M33 pair (TrustZone-M) and a RISC-V Hazard3 pair (PMP) on one die. I built the same minimal isolation demo on both — a guarded secret, a call-in service, and a deliberate illegal read — and verified both on the same Pico 2 over SWD. Findings, all measured rather than read off a spec:

  • Same result, different shape. Both block the illegal read with the secret intact. TrustZone partitions the address map and the toolchain builds the gate for you; PMP filters by privilege and you write the gate yourself.
  • Arm tells you where it broke, Hazard3 doesn’t. SFSR = 0x48 sets SFARVALID, so the faulting address is there for the taking. Hazard3 leaves mtval = 0 on a PMP access fault. mcause = 5 is all you get.
  • The same silicon only fought one of them. The Arm Non-Secure side hit two RP2350 walls that forced a bare-metal, RAM-resident NS image. The RISC-V U-mode side just ran from flash.
  • Hazard3 has a trick TrustZone structurally can’t do: Xh3pmpm lets M-mode sandbox itself, reversibly.
  • Neither of them covers the DMA. That’s a separate MPU, and it’s the RP2350 detail most likely to quietly ruin your day.

Code: rp2350-tz-teeminimal-tz (Arm) and minimal-pmp (RISC-V).

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