Your Android smartphone is made of several components. Broadly, it has a hardware side and a software side to it. Mobile operating systems are known to have better security compared to their desktop counterparts due to an increased focus on security and control over what apps can do. However, the firmware brings together all the hardware and makes your Android phone work properly.
But that also allows attackers to take advantage of the phone’s hardware and make it function as per their needs. To tackle this, Google is making robust security enhancements at the firmware level for your Samsung and (all other) Android phones.
Firmware Hardening will help avoid attacks on Android smartphones
In an official blog post, Google announced that it is working with partners to strengthen the security of Android smartphones on the firmware level. The Android security team is calling this procedure ‘Firmware Hardening.’ This means that Google will provide enhanced security at the firmware level to negate the exploitation of bugs, exploits, and remote hijacking.
Google said that it is taking the help of compiler-based sanitizers like BoundSan and IntSan, and other mitigation products such as CFI, kCFI, Shadow Call Stack, and Stack Canaries to enhance the security of an Android phone further. The company also said it would add more memory safety features, such as ‘Auto-initialize Memory’ in firmware.
One big thing that Google pointed out is that this Firmware Hardening needs to strike the right balance with the phone to avoid any performance compromises. As a regular user, all you should note is that your Android phone is getting more secure, but that isn’t something you will notice on the software front.
