Posted by Alex Rebert and Max Shavrick, Security Foundations, and Kinuko Yasuda, Core DeveloperAttackers regularly exploit spatial memory safety vulnerabilities, which occur when code accesses a memory allocation outside of its intended bounds, to compromise systems and sensitive data. These vulnerabilities represent a major security risk to users. Based on an analysis of in-the-wild exploits tracked by Google's Project Zero, spatial safety vulnerabilities represent 40% of in-the-wild memory safety exploits over the past decade:Breakdown of memory safety CVEs exploited in the wild by vulnerability class.1Google is taking a comprehensive approach to memory safety. A key element of our strategy focuses on Safe Coding and using memory-safe languages in new code. This leads to an exponential decline in memory safety vulnerabilities and quickly improves the overall security posture of a codebase, as demonstrated by our post about Android's journey to memory safety.However, this transition w

Posted by Lyubov Farafonova, Product Manager and Steve Kafka, Group Product Manager, AndroidUser safety is at the heart of everything we do at Google. Our mission to make technology helpful for everyone means building features that protect you while keeping your privacy top of mind. From Gmail’s defenses that stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware, to Google Messages’ advanced security that protects users from 2 billion suspicious messages a month and beyond, we're constantly developing and expanding protection features that help keep you safe.We're introducing two new real-time protection features that enhance your safety, all while safeguarding your privacy: Scam Detection in Phone by Google to protect you from scams and fraud, and Google Play Protect live threat detection with real-time alerts to protect you from malware and dangerous apps.These new security features are available first on Pixel, and are coming soon to more Android devices. More intelligent AI-powered pr

Posted by Jan Jedrzejowicz, Director of Product, Android and Business Communications; Alberto Pastor Nieto, Sr. Product Manager Google Messages and RCS Spam and Abuse; Stephan Somogyi, Product Lead, User Protection; Branden Archer, Software EngineerEvery day, over a billion people use Google Messages to communicate. That’s why we’ve made security a top priority, building in powerful on-device, AI-powered filters and advanced security that protects users from 2 billion suspicious messages a month. With end-to-end encrypted1 RCS conversations, you can communicate privately with other Google Messages RCS users. And we’re not stopping there. We're committed to constantly developing new controls and features to make your conversations on Google Messages even more secure and private.As part of cybersecurity awareness month, we're sharing five new protections to help keep you safe while using Google Messages on Android:Enhanced detection protects you from package delivery and job scams. Googl

Posted by Alex Rebert, Security Foundations, and Chandler Carruth, Jen Engel, Andy Qin, Core DevelopersError-prone interactions between software and memory1 are widely understood to create safety issues in software. It is estimated that about 70% of severe vulnerabilities2 in memory-unsafe codebases are due to memory safety bugs. Malicious actors exploit these vulnerabilities and continue to create real-world harm. In 2023, Google’s threat intelligence teams conducted an industry-wide study and observed a close to all-time high number of vulnerabilities exploited in the wild. Our internal analysis estimates that 75% of CVEs used in zero-day exploits are memory safety vulnerabilities.At Google, we have been mindful of these issues for over two decades, and are on a journey to continue advancing the state of memory safety in the software we consume and produce. Our Secure by Design commitment emphasizes integrating security considerations, including robust memory safety practices, throug

Posted by Jianing Sandra Guo, Product Manager and Nataliya Stanetsky, Staff Program Manager, Android97 phones are robbed or stolen every hour in Brazil. The GSM Association reports millions of devices stolen every year, and the numbers continue to grow. With our phones becoming increasingly central to storing sensitive data, like payment information and personal details, losing one can be an unsettling experience. That’s why we developed and thoroughly beta tested, a full suite of features designed to protect you and your data at every stage – before, during, and after device theft. These advanced theft protection features are now available to users around the world through Android 15 and a Google Play Services update (Android 10+ devices). AI-powered protection for your device the moment it is stolen Theft Detection Lock uses powerful AI to proactively protect you at the moment of a theft attempt. By using on-device machine learning, Theft Detection Lock is able to analyze various dev

Posted by Adrian Taylor, Security Engineer, Chrome .code { font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace; font-size: 11.8px; font-weight: bold; background-color: #f4f4f4; padding: 2px; border: 1px solid #ccc; border-radius: 2px; white-space: pre-wrap; display: inline-block; line-height: 12px;}.highlight { color: red;} Chrome’s user interface (UI) code is complex, and sometimes has bugs. Are those bugs security bugs? Specifically, if a user’s clicks and actions result in memory corruption, is that something that an attacker can exploit to harm that user?Our security severity guidelines say “yes, sometimes.” For example, an attacker could very likely convince a user to click an autofill prompt, but it will be much harder to convince the user to step through a whole flow of different dialogs.Even if these bugs aren’t the most easily exploitable, it takes a great deal of time for our security shepherds to make these determinations. User interface bugs are often flakey (that is, not reliab

Posted by Sherk Chung, Stephan Chen, Pixel team, and Roger Piqueras Jover, Ivan Lozano, Android teamPixel 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 been deploying security hardening mitigations in our basebands for years, and Pixel 9 represents the most hardened baseband we

Posted by Alex Gough, Chrome Security TeamThe 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 investing in Rust for memory safety, hardening our existing C++ code-base, and improving detection with GWP-asan and lightweight use-after-free (UAF) detection. Considerations of user-harm and attack utility shape

Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep - Android team, and Alex Rebert - Security FoundationsMemory 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 results1 as new memory unsafe development slows down, and new memory safe development starts to take ove

Posted by Xuan Xing, Eugene Rodionov, Jon Bottarini, Adam Bacchus - Android Red Team; Amit Chaudhary, Lyndon Fawcett, Joseph Artgole - Arm Product Security TeamWho cares about GPUs?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 good hygiene as it can lead to the detection and resolution of new vulnerabilities before they’re exploited. It’s also one of the most complex investigations to do as you don’t necessarily know where the vulnerability will appear (that’s the point!). By combining the expertise of Google’s engineers with IP owners and OEMs, we can ensure the Android ecosystem retains a strong measure of integrity. Why investigate GPUs?Functionality vs. Security Tradeoffs Nobody wants a slow, unresponsive device; any hits to GPU per

Posted by David Adrian, David Benjamin, Bob Beck & Devon O'Brien, Chrome TeamWe previously posted about experimenting with a hybrid post-quantum key exchange, and enabling it for 100% of Chrome Desktop clients. The hybrid key exchange used both the pre-quantum X25519 algorithm, and the new post-quantum algorithm Kyber. At the time, the NIST standardization process for Kyber had not yet finished.Since then, the Kyber algorithm has been standardized with minor technical changes and renamed to the Module Lattice Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM). We have implemented ML-KEM in Google’s cryptography library, BoringSSL, which allows for it to be deployed and utilized by services that depend on this library.The changes to the final version of ML-KEM make it incompatible with the previously deployed version of Kyber. As a result, the codepoint in TLS for hybrid post-quantum key exchange is changing from 0x6399 for Kyber768+X25519, to 0x11EC for ML-KEM768+X25519. To handle this, we will be m

Posted by Ivan Lozano and Dominik Maier, Android Team Android's use of safe-by-design principles drives our adoption of memory-safe languages like Rust, making exploitation of the OS increasingly difficult with every release. To provide a secure foundation, we’re extending hardening and the use of memory-safe languages to low-level firmware (including in Trusty apps).In this blog post, we'll show you how to gradually introduce Rust into your existing firmware, prioritizing new code and the most security-critical code. You'll see how easy it is to boost security with drop-in Rust replacements, and we'll even demonstrate how the Rust toolchain can handle specialized bare-metal targets.Drop-in Rust replacements for C code are not a novel idea and have been used in other cases, such as librsvg’s adoption of Rust which involved replacing C functions with Rust functions in-place. We seek to demonstrate that this approach is viable for firmware, providing a path to memory-safety in an efficie

Posted by Dave Kleidermacher, VP Engineering, Android Security and Privacy, and Giles Hogben, Senior Director, Privacy Engineering, AndroidYour 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 end-to-end protection in a way that only Google can. From privacy on-device when handling sensitive data to the

Posted by Royal Hansen, VP, Privacy, Safety and Security Engineering, Google, and Phil Venables, VP, TI Security & CISO, Google CloudThe National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) just released three finalized standards for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) covering public key encapsulation and two forms of digital signatures. In progress since 2016, this achievement represents a major milestone towards standards development that will keep information on the Internet secure and confidential for many years to come. Here's a brief overview of what PQC is, how Google is using PQC, and how other organizations can adopt these new standards. You can also read more about PQC and Google's role in the standardization process in this 2022 post from Cloud CISO Phil Venables.What is PQC?quantum computers are still years away, but computer scientists have known for decades that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) could break existing forms of asymmetric key cryptography.PQ

Posted by Nataliya Stanetsky and Roger Piqueras Jover, Android Security & Privacy TeamCell-site simulators, also known as False Base Stations (FBS) or Stingrays, are radio devices that mimic real cell sites in order to lure mobile devices to connect to them. These devices are commonly used for security and privacy attacks, such as surveillance and interception of communications. In recent years, carriers have started reporting new types of abuse perpetrated with FBSs for the purposes of financial fraud.In particular, there is increasingly more evidence of the exploitation of weaknesses in cellular communication standards leveraging cell-site simulators to inject SMS phishing messages directly into smartphones. This method to inject messages entirely bypasses the carrier network, thus bypassing all the sophisticated network-based anti-spam and anti-fraud filters. Instances of this new type of fraud, which carriers refer to as SMS Blaster fraud, have been reported in Vietnam, France, Nor

Posted by Will Harris, Chrome Security TeamCybercriminals using cookie theft infostealer malware continue to pose a risk to the safety and security of our users. We already have a number of initiatives in this area including Chrome’s download protection using Safe Browsing, Device Bound Session Credentials, and Google’s account-based threat detection to flag the use of stolen cookies. Today, we’re announcing another layer of protection to make Windows users safer from this type of malware.Like other software that needs to store secrets, Chrome currently secures sensitive data like cookies and passwords using the strongest techniques the OS makes available to us - on macOS this is the Keychain services, and on Linux we use a system provided wallet such as kwallet or gnome-libsecret. On Windows, Chrome uses the Data Protection API (DPAPI) which protects the data at rest from other users on the system or cold boot attacks. However, the DPAPI does not protect against malicious applications

Posted by Jasika Bawa, Lily Chen, and Daniel Rubery, Chrome SecurityLast year, we introduced a redesign of the Chrome downloads experience on desktop to make it easier for users to interact with recent downloads. At the time, we mentioned that the additional space and more flexible UI of the new Chrome downloads experience would give us new opportunities to make sure users stay safe when downloading files. Adding context and consistency to download warningsThe redesigned Chrome downloads experience gives us the opportunity to provide even more context when Chrome protects a user from a potentially malicious file. Taking advantage of the additional space available in the new downloads UI, we have replaced our previous warning messages with more detailed ones that convey more nuance about the nature of the danger and can help users make more informed decisions.Our legacy, space-constrained warning vs. our redesigned oneWe also made download warnings more understandable by introducing a t

Posted by Chrome Root Program, Chrome Security TeamUpdate (09/10/2024): In support of more closely aligning Chrome’s planned compliance action with a major release milestone (i.e., M131), blocking action will now begin on November 12, 2024. This post has been updated to reflect the date change. Website operators who will be impacted by the upcoming change can explore continuity options offered by Entrust. Entrust has expressed its commitment to continuing to support customer needs, and is best positioned to describe the available options for website operators. Learn more at Entrust’s TLS Certificate Information Center. .code { font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace; font-size: 11.8px; font-weight: bold; background-color: #f4f4f4; padding: 10px; border: 1px solid #ccc; border-radius: 2px; white-space: pre-wrap; display: inline-block; line-height: 12px;}.highlight { color: red;} The Chrome Security Team prioritizes the security and privacy of Chrome’s users, and we are unwilling

Marios Pomonis, Software EngineerGoogle is committed to enhancing the security of open-source technologies, especially those that make up the foundation for many of our products, like Linux and KVM. To this end we are excited to announce the launch of kvmCTF, a vulnerability reward program (VRP) for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor first announced in October 2023.KVM is a robust hypervisor with over 15 years of open-source development and is widely used throughout the consumer and enterprise landscape, including platforms such as Android and Google Cloud. Google is an active contributor to the project and we designed kvmCTF as a collaborative way to help identify & remediate vulnerabilities and further harden this fundamental security boundary. Similar to kernelCTF, kvmCTF is a vulnerability reward program designed to help identify and address vulnerabilities in the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. It offers a lab environment where participants can log in

Oliver Chang, Jonathan Metzman, OSS-Fuzz and Alex Rebert, Security EngineeringThe US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, recently kicked off a two-year AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), inviting top AI and cybersecurity experts to design new AI systems to help secure major open source projects which our critical infrastructure relies upon. As AI continues to grow, it’s crucial to invest in AI tools for Defenders, and this competition will help advance technology to do so. Google’s OSS-Fuzz and Security Engineering teams have been excited to assist AIxCC organizers in designing their challenges and competition framework. We also playtested the competition by building a Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) tackling DARPA’s exemplar challenge. This blog post will share our approach to the exemplar challenge using open source technology found in Google’s OSS-Fuzz, highlighting opportunities where AI can supercharge the platform’s ability to find and patch vulnerabilities, which we hope wil

Posted by Benjamin Ackerman, Anunoy Ghosh and David Warren, Chrome Security Team .code { background-color: #f4f4f4; border: 1px solid #ccc; border-radius: 4px; padding: 13px; }.highlight { color: red;} Chrome extensions can boost your browsing, empowering you to do anything from customizing the look of sites to providing personalized advice when you’re planning a vacation. But as with any software, extensions can also introduce risk. That’s why we have a team whose only job is to focus on keeping you safe as you install and take advantage of Chrome extensions. Our team:Provides you with a personalized summary of the extensions you’ve installedReviews extensions before they’re published on the Chrome Web StoreContinuously monitors extensions after they’re publishedA summary of your extensionsExtensions suspected of including malwareExtensions that violate Chrome Web Store policiesExtensions that have been unpublished by a developer, which might indicate that an extension is no longer su

Hlynur Gudmundsson, Software EngineerIt’s Google CTF time! Install your tools, commit your scripts, and clear your schedule. The competition kicks off on June 21 2024 6:00 PM UTC and runs through June 23 2024 6:00 PM UTC. Registration is now open at goo.gle/ctf.Join the Google CTF (at goo.gle/ctf), a thrilling arena to showcase your technical prowess. The Google CTF consists of a set of computer security puzzles (or challenges) involving reverse-engineering, memory corruption, cryptography, web technologies, and more. Participants can use obscure security knowledge to find exploits through bugs and creative misuse, and with each completed challenge your team will earn points and move up through the ranks. The top 8 teams of the Google CTF will qualify for our Hackceler8 competition taking place in Málaga, Spain later this year as a part of our larger Escal8 event. Hackceler8 is our experimental esport-style hacking game competition, custom-made to mix CTF and speedrunning. Screenshot f

Matt Linton, Chaos SpecialistIn the late 19th and early 20th century, a series of catastrophic fires in short succession led an outraged public to demand action from the budding fire protection industry. Among the experts, one initial focus was on “Fire Evacuation Tests”. The earliest of these tests focused on individual performance and tested occupants on their evacuation speed, sometimes performing the tests “by surprise” as though the fire drill were a real fire. These early tests were more likely to result in injuries to the test-takers than any improvement in survivability. It wasn’t until introducing better protective engineering - wider doors, push bars at exits, firebreaks in construction, lighted exit signs, and so on - that survival rates from building fires began to improve. As protections evolved over the years and improvements like mandatory fire sprinklers became required in building code, survival rates have continued to improve steadily, and “tests” have evolved into an

Posted by Dave Kleidermacher, VP Engineering, Android Security and PrivacyOur commitment to user safety is a top priority for Android. We’ve been consistently working to stay ahead of the world’s scammers, fraudsters and bad actors. And as their tactics evolve in sophistication and scale, we continually adapt and enhance our advanced security features and AI-powered protections to help keep Android users safe. In addition to our new suite of advanced theft protection features to help keep your device and data safe in the case of theft, we’re also focusing increasingly on providing additional protections against mobile financial fraud and scams. Google Play Protect live threat detectionGoogle Play Protect now scans 200 billion Android apps daily, helping keep more than 3 billion users safe from malware. We are expanding Play Protect’s on-device AI capabilities with Google Play Protect live threat detection to improve fraud and abuse detection against apps that try to cloak their actions

Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers – for Bluetooth tracking devices that makes it possible to alert users across both Android and iOS if such a device is unknowingly being used to track them. This will help mitigate the misuse of devices designed to help keep track of belongings. Google is now launching this capability on Android 6.0+ devices, and today Apple is implementing this capability in iOS 17.5.Multi-layered user protections, including first of its kind safety-first protections, help mitigate potential risks to user privacy and safety while allowing users to effectively locate and recover lost devices. This cross-platform collaboration — an industry first, involving community and industry input — offers instructions and best practices for manufacturers, should they choose to build unwanted tracking alert capabilities into their products. Google and Apple will continue to work with the Internet Engineering Task Force via the Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers working group t