Oct 03, 2024 Ravie LakshmananMobile Safety / Generation
Google has printed various safety features which were integrated into its newest Pixel gadgets to struggle the rising risk of baseband safety. Cellular baseband (ie, modem) refers to a processor on a tool that handles all communications, similar to LTE, 4G, and 5G, with a cell phone tower or radio base station. “This paintings additionally comes to processing exterior inputs, which will come from untrusted other people,” Sherk Chung and Stephan Chen of the Pixel staff, and Roger Piqueras Jover and Ivan Lozano from the corporate’s Android staff stated in a publish shared with The Hacker Information. “For instance, attackers can use pretend stations to inject solid or changed community packets. In different techniques similar to IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), this may also be accomplished remotely from any location on the planet the usage of an IMS consumer.”
As well as, firmware that helps mobile bands can be at risk of insects and mistakes that, if correctly exploited, can compromise the protection of the instrument, particularly in environments that result in faraway code execution. On the Black Hat USA presentation ultimate August, a bunch of Google safety professionals described the modem as “very important” and “crucial” for a cell phone with get right of entry to to data and faraway get right of entry to to more than a few radio applied sciences. Threats to the baseband aren’t speculative. In October 2023, an investigation revealed through Amnesty Global discovered that the Intellexa consortium at the back of Predator had evolved a device known as Triton to take advantage of a vulnerability within the Exynos baseband device utilized in Samsung gadgets to ship malicious espionage as a part of essentially the most centered threats. The assault comes to making a hidden risk that forces the instrument to connect with a 2G community the usage of a cellphone, after which a 2G base station transceiver (BTS) is used to distribute malicious payloads. Google has offered a brand new safety characteristic in Android 14 that permits IT directors to show off 2G mobile community reinforce on their controlled gadgets. It has additionally reviewed the function performed through Clang sanitizers (IntSan and BoundSan) in hardening mobile baseband safety in Android. Then previous this 12 months, the tech massive printed that it’s running with environmental companions so as to add new tactics to inform Android customers if their community is attached to a non-public community and if a pretend mobile phone or monitoring instrument is recording their location the usage of the instrument’s identifier. The corporate has additionally defined what it’s doing to struggle attackers the usage of mobile techniques like Stingrays to inject SMS messages at once into Android telephones, referred to as the SMS Blaster rip-off. “This technique of recording messages bypasses provider networks, thereby bypassing the Web’s anti-spam and anti-fraud filters,” Google stated in August. “SMS Blasters divulge a pretend LTE or 5G community that does something: obtain the person’s connection to the 2G protocol.”
One of the security measures that the corporate has added to its new Pixel 9 line come with stack canaries, control-flow integrity (CFI), and automated switching to 0 to stop the leakage of delicate information or turn into a supply of code. to be killed. “Stack canaries are like tripwires which can be set as much as be sure that code is operating as anticipated,” it stated. “If a hacker tries to make use of a vulnerability within the stack to modify the execution movement with out taking note of the canary, the canary “walks”, alerting the device to be destroyed.” “Like stack canaries, CFI guarantees that code execution is averted in various tactics. If an attacker tries to deviate from the allowed integration paths, CFI reasons the modem to restart as an alternative of taking an unlawful trail.
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