Google Strengthens Android Firmware - ThreatWire
Added 2023-03-01 17:20:08 +0000 UTCAs a response to a variety of attack vectors which have become more and more common over the last decade, Google has announced they’ll start focusing on strengthening the security of Android at a firmware level. This is to combat the targeting and exploitation of vulnerabilities that hit firmware running on secondary processors, which have been a common point of discussion for CVEs, talks, and hackathons.
Firmware interacts with SoCs inside devices, and control things like cellular communications, security modules, and media processing. But many vulnerabilities have been shared which use exploits in firmware to deliver malicious payloads and inject code.
Google aims to focus on several improvements to security by implementing mitigations such as compiler based sanitizers to catch issues with memory safety, adding Control Flow Integrity, Kernel Control Flow Integrity, ShadowCallStack which protects against return address overwrites, and Stack Canaries. They also plan to enable Auto Initialize Memory in firmware.
These protections can prevent buffer overflows, use after free attacks, and memory data leaks. Google mentions in their blog post that impacts to performance and stability will be minimal.
LINKS:
https://security.googleblog.com/2023/02/hardening-firmware-across-android.html
https://thehackernews.com/2023/02/google-teams-up-with-ecosystem-partners.html
