Google is highlighting the role played by Clang sanitizers in hardening the security of the cellular baseband in the Android operating system and preventing specific kinds of vulnerabilities.
This comprises Integer Overflow Sanitizer (IntSan) and BoundsSanitizer (BoundSan), both of which are part of UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer (UBSan), a tool designed to catch various kinds of undefined behavior during program execution.
IntSan and BoundSan are two of the compiler-based sanitizers that Google has enabled as an exploit mitigation measure to detect arithmetic overflows and perform bounds checks around array accesses, respectively.
Google acknowledged that while both BoundSan and IntSan incur a substantial performance overhead, it has enabled it in security-critical attack surfaces ahead of a full-fledged rollout over the entire codebase. This covers –
In early October 2023, Google announced that it had rewritten the Android Virtualization Framework’s (AVF) protected VM (pVM) firmware in Rust to provide a memory-safe foundation for the pVM root of trust.
“By using modern toolchains and deploying exploit mitigation technologies, the bar for attacking the baseband can be raised as well.”
Source: https://thehackernews.com/
