TL;DR
- Google has strengthened the baseband on the Pixel 9 series.
- It has made the device and data safer than ever before.
- strengthening baseband includes bounds sanitizer, CFI, Stack canaries & more.
Google launched the Pixel 9 Series including Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro a few months ago and these are one of the best Android smartphones launched this year. Now, the devices have gotten even better as they have become even safer. All thanks to Google hardening the cellular baseband that was found in Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro. Google has tightened the security across its Pixel phones lineup by tweaking some of the components. The company has set a new standard for baseband security with the Pixel 9 Series making them the most secure devices to date. While earlier Pixel devices were good too, Pixel 9 has entered a league of its own.
Let us talk about what this baseband is and how has Google implemented it.
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What is baseband?
Baseband handles everything the phone needs to communicate with a cellular network like calls, texts, and even data. It is a mini-computer inside your phone. One can consider the baseband as the front door for the phone’s connection with the rest of the world. The user wants it to be as strong and secure as possible so that nothing enters the device without permission. Since bad actors are always trying to look for ways to get in by exploiting vulnerabilities in baseband, the company has made it stronger so that there are no privacy issues in the device. If the baseband is weak, attackers will be able to enter and steal personal data or even control your phone, so having a strong baseband is vital for keeping the device secure.
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How has Google strengthened baseband?
The process of making Pixel phones secure has not taken place in one year. Google has been gradually increasing the security of Pixel baseband over the last few years but it is finally in 2024 that the Pixel 9 Series will be able to receive this increased protection. As a result, the Pixel 9 series has the most hardened baseband yet, and thus hackers will find it almost impossible to get through it. This has been done by implementing various security measures-
Bounds Sanitizer- Buffer overflows take place when a bug in code allows attackers to cram too much data into a confined space, which makes it spill over and maybe corrupt other data. It can even bring into action the malicious codes. To tackle this problem Bounds Sanitizer will automatically add checks around a specific subset of memory accesses to make sure that the code does not access memory outside the designated area. This will prevent memory corruption and keep the device safe.
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Integer Overflow Sanitizer– Numbers are very important and when they get too big, an overflow can cause them to be wrongly interpreted as smaller values. The opposite can happen as well which means the number can overflow in the negative direction and be interpreted as a larger value. These overflows can be exploited by attackers to cause weird behavior Integer Overflow Sanitizer can add checks around these wrong calculations to prevent the risk of memory getting corrupted due to these vulnerabilities.
Stack Canaries- Stack canaries are tripwires that are set up to make sure code executes in the order it is expected to. Thus if a hacker tries to exploit any vulnerability in the stack to change the flow of execution without thinking of the canary, the canary trip alerts the system to a potential attack thus preventing it.
Control Flow Integrity- Control Flow Integrity (CFI), akin to stack canaries, restricts code execution to a predetermined set of paths. If an attacker attempts to stray from these permitted execution paths, CFI triggers a restart of the modem instead of allowing the unauthorized execution to proceed.
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Auto-Initialize Stack Variables- When memory is allocated in C/C++, it is typically not initialized, as it is assumed that the developer will properly configure the allocated space. If a developer neglects to do this, uninitialized values may expose sensitive information or be exploited by attackers to achieve unauthorized execution. In contrast, Pixel phones automatically set stack variables to zero, effectively mitigating this type of vulnerability related to stack data.
These technical terms might be difficult to understand but the bottom line is that Google has made the baseband even stronger with Pixel 9 series. This has made Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro more secure than ever before.
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