Google's Latest Efforts to Strengthen Security on the Pixel 9

Google has detailed the security measures it has taken with the Pixel 9 series of smartphones, focusing on increasing their resilience against baseband attacks.

The cellular baseband is the processor responsible for managing LTE, 4G, and 5G communications. Vulnerabilities in this component can pose a significant concern due to its exposure within the device’s attack surface.

Google has incorporated protections that can restart the modem or alert the system of potential attacks on the Pixel 9 series devices. These include Bounds Sanitizer, Integer Overflow Sanitizer, Stack Canaries, Control Flow Integrity, and Auto-Initialize Stack Variables. Google believes these measures significantly increase the Pixel 9’s resilience to baseband attacks.