Blog

Posted by Dave Kleidermacher, VP Engineering, Android Security and Privacy, and Giles Hogben, Senior Director, Privacy Engineering, Android Your smartphone holds a lot of your personal information to help you get things done every day. On Android, we are seamlessly integrating the latest artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, like Gemini as a trusted assistant – capable of handling life's essential tasks. As such, ensuring your privacy and security on Android is paramount. As a pioneer in responsible AI and cutting-edge privacy technologies like Private Compute Core and federated learning, we made sure our approach to the assistant experience with Gemini on Android is aligned with our existing Secure AI framework, AI Principles and Privacy Principles. We’ve always safeguarded your data with an integrated stack of world-class secure infrastructure and technology, delivering…

Posted by Xuan Xing, Eugene Rodionov, Jon Bottarini, Adam Bacchus - Android Red Team; Amit Chaudhary, Lyndon Fawcett, Joseph Artgole - Arm Product Security Team Who cares about GPUs? You, me, and the entire ecosystem! GPUs (graphics processing units) are critical in delivering rich visual experiences on mobile devices. However, the GPU software and firmware stack has become a way for attackers to gain permissions and entitlements (privilege escalation) to Android-based devices. There are plenty of issues in this category that can affect all major GPU brands, for example, CVE-2023-4295, CVE-2023-21106, CVE-2021-0884, and more. Most exploitable GPU vulnerabilities are in the implementation of the GPU kernel mode modules. These modules are pieces of code that load/unload during runtime, extending functionality without the need to reboot the device. Proactive testing is…

Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep - Android team, and Alex Rebert - Security Foundations Memory safety vulnerabilities remain a pervasive threat to software security. At Google, we believe the path to eliminating this class of vulnerabilities at scale and building high-assurance software lies in Safe Coding, a secure-by-design approach that prioritizes transitioning to memory-safe languages. This post demonstrates why focusing on Safe Coding for new code quickly and counterintuitively reduces the overall security risk of a codebase, finally breaking through the stubbornly high plateau of memory safety vulnerabilities and starting an exponential decline, all while being scalable and cost-effective. We’ll also share updated data on how the percentage of memory safety vulnerabilities in Android dropped from 76% to 24% over 6 years as development shifted to memory safe languages. Counterintuitive…

Posted by Alex Gough, Chrome Security Team The Chrome Security Team is constantly striving to make it safer to browse the web. We invest in mechanisms to make classes of security bugs impossible, mitigations that make it more difficult to exploit a security bug, and sandboxing to reduce the capability exposed by an isolated security issue. When choosing where to invest it is helpful to consider how bad actors find and exploit vulnerabilities. In this post we discuss several axes along which to evaluate the potential harm to users from exploits, and how they apply to the Chrome browser. Historically the Chrome Security Team has made major investments and driven the web to be safer. We pioneered browser sandboxing, site isolation and the migration to an encrypted web. Today we’re…

Posted by Sherk Chung, Stephan Chen, Pixel team, and Roger Piqueras Jover, Ivan Lozano, Android team Pixel phones have earned a well-deserved reputation for being security-conscious. In this blog, we'll take a peek under the hood to see how Pixel mitigates common exploits on cellular basebands. Smartphones have become an integral part of our lives, but few of us think about the complex software that powers them, especially the cellular baseband – the processor on the device responsible for handling all cellular communication (such as LTE, 4G, and 5G). Most smartphones use cellular baseband processors with tight performance constraints, making security hardening difficult. Security researchers have increasingly exploited this attack vector and routinely demonstrated the possibility of exploiting basebands used in popular smartphones. The good news is that Pixel has…