Correctness of code in the Android platform is a top priority for the security, stability, and quality of each Android release. Memory safety bugs in C and C++ continue to be the most-difficult-to-address source of incorrectness. We invest a great deal of effort and resources into detecting, fixing, and mitigating this class of bugs, and these efforts are effective in preventing a large number of bugs from making it into Android releases. Yet in spite of these efforts, memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Android’s high severity security vulnerabilities.
In addition to ongoing and upcoming efforts to improve detection of memory bugs, we are ramping up efforts to prevent them in the first place. Memory-safe languages are the most cost-effective means for preventing memory bugs. In addition to memory-safe languages like Kotlin and Java, we’re excited to announce that the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) now supports the Rust programming language for developing the OS itself.
Managed languages like Java and Kotlin are the best option for Android app development. These languages are designed for ease of use, portability, and safety. The Android Runtime (ART) manages memory on behalf of the developer. The Android OS uses Java extensively, effectively protecting large portions of the Android platform from memory bugs. Unfortunately, for the lower layers of the OS, Java and Kotlin are not an option.
Lower levels of the OS require systems programming languages like C, C++, and Rust. These languages are designed with control and predictability as goals. They provide access to low level system resources and hardware. They are light on resources and have more predictable performance characteristics.For C and C++, the developer is responsible for managing memory lifetime. Unfortunately, it's easy to make mistakes when doing this, especially in complex and multithreaded codebases.
Rust provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid. This safety is achieved while providing equivalent performance to C and C++.
C and C++ languages don’t provide these same safety guarantees and require robust isolation. All Android processes are sandboxed and we follow the Rule of 2 to decide if functionality necessitates additional isolation and deprivileging. The Rule of 2 is simple: given three options, developers may only select two of the following three options.
For Android, this means that if code is written in C/C++ and parses untrustworthy input, it should be contained within a tightly constrained and unprivileged sandbox. While adherence to the Rule of 2 has been effective in reducing the severity and reachability of security vulnerabilities, it does come with limitations. Sandboxing is expensive: the new processes it requires consume additional overhead and introduce latency due to IPC and additional memory usage. Sandboxing doesn’t eliminate vulnerabilities from the code and its efficacy is reduced by high bug density, allowing attackers to chain multiple vulnerabilities together.
Memory-safe languages like Rust help us overcome these limitations in two ways:
Of course, introducing a new programming language does nothing to address bugs in our existing C/C++ code. Even if we redirected the efforts of every software engineer on the Android team, rewriting tens of millions of lines of code is simply not feasible.
The above analysis of the age of memory safety bugs in Android (measured from when they were first introduced) demonstrates why our memory-safe language efforts are best focused on new development and not on rewriting mature C/C++ code. Most of our memory bugs occur in new or recently modified code, with about 50% being less than a year old.
The comparative rarity of older memory bugs may come as a surprise to some, but we’ve found that old code is not where we most urgently need improvement. Software bugs are found and fixed over time, so we would expect the number of bugs in code that is being maintained but not actively developed to go down over time. Just as reducing the number and density of bugs improves the effectiveness of sandboxing, it also improves the effectiveness of bug detection.
Bug detection via robust testing, sanitization, and fuzzing is crucial for improving the quality and correctness of all software, including software written in Rust. A key limitation for the most effective memory safety detection techniques is that the erroneous state must actually be triggered in instrumented code in order to be detected. Even in code bases with excellent test/fuzz coverage, this results in a lot of bugs going undetected.
Another limitation is that bug detection is scaling faster than bug fixing. In some projects, bugs that are being detected are not always getting fixed. Bug fixing is a long and costly process.
Each of these steps is costly, and missing any one of them can result in the bug going unpatched for some or all users. For complex C/C++ code bases, often there are only a handful of people capable of developing and reviewing the fix, and even with a high amount of effort spent on fixing bugs, sometimes the fixes are incorrect.
Bug detection is most effective when bugs are relatively rare and dangerous bugs can be given the urgency and priority that they merit. Our ability to reap the benefits of improvements in bug detection require that we prioritize preventing the introduction of new bugs.
Rust modernizes a range of other language aspects, which results in improved correctness of code:
Adding a new language to the Android platform is a large undertaking. There are toolchains and dependencies that need to be maintained, test infrastructure and tooling that must be updated, and developers that need to be trained. For the past 18 months we have been adding Rust support to the Android Open Source Project, and we have a few early adopter projects that we will be sharing in the coming months. Scaling this to more of the OS is a multi-year project. Stay tuned, we will be posting more updates on this blog.
Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Thanks Matthew Maurer, Bram Bonne, and Lars Bergstrom for contributions to this post. Special thanks to our colleagues, Adrian Taylor for his insight into the age of memory vulnerabilities, and to Chris Palmer for his work on “The Rule of 2” and “The limits of Sandboxing”.
When the Pixel 3 launched in 2018, it had a new tamper-resistant hardware enclave called Titan M. In addition to being a root-of-trust for Pixel software and firmware, it also enabled tamper-resistant key storage for Android Apps using StrongBox. StrongBox is an implementation of the Keymaster HAL that resides in a hardware security module. It is an important security enhancement for Android devices and paved the way for us to consider features that were previously not possible.
StrongBox and tamper-resistant hardware are becoming important requirements for emerging user features, including:
All these features need to run on tamper-resistant hardware to protect the integrity of the application executables and a user’s data, keys, wallet, and more. Most modern phones now include discrete tamper-resistant hardware called a Secure Element (SE). We believe this SE offers the best path for introducing these new consumer use cases in Android.
In order to accelerate adoption of these new Android use cases, we are announcing the formation of the Android Ready SE Alliance. SE vendors are joining hands with Google to create a set of open-source, validated, and ready-to-use SE Applets. Today, we are launching the General Availability (GA) version of StrongBox for SE. This applet is qualified and ready for use by our OEM partners. It is currently available from Giesecke+Devrient, Kigen, NXP, STMicroelectronics, and Thales.
It is important to note that these features are not just for phones and tablets. StrongBox is also applicable to WearOS, Android Auto Embedded, and Android TV.
Using Android Ready SE in a device requires the OEM to:
We are working with our ecosystem to prioritize and deliver the following Applets in conjunction with corresponding Android feature releases:
We already have several Android OEMs adopting Android Ready SE for their devices. We look forward to working with our OEM partners to bring these next generation features for our users.
Please visit our Android Security and Privacy developer site for more info.
Posted by Stephen Röttger and Artur Janc, Information Security Engineers
Three years ago, Spectre changed the way we think about security boundaries on the web. It quickly became clear that flaws in modern processors undermined the guarantees that web browsers could make about preventing data leaks between applications. As a result, web browser vendors have been continuously collaborating on approaches intended to harden the platform at scale. Nevertheless, this class of attacks still remains a concern and requires web developers to deploy application-level mitigations.
In this post, we will share the results of Google Security Team's research on the exploitability of Spectre against web users, and present a fast, versatile proof-of-concept (PoC) written in JavaScript which can leak information from the browser's memory. We've confirmed that this proof-of-concept, or its variants, function across a variety of operating systems, processor architectures, and hardware generations.
By sharing our findings with the security community, we aim to give web application owners a better understanding of the impact Spectre vulnerabilities can have on the security of their users' data. Finally, this post describes the protections available to web authors and best practices for enabling them in web applications, based on our experience across Google.
A bit of background
The Spectre vulnerability, disclosed to the public in January 2018, makes use of a class of processor (CPU) design vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to change the intended program control flow while the CPU is speculatively executing subsequent instructions. For example, the CPU may speculate that a length check passes, while in practice it will access out-of-bounds memory. While the CPU state is rolled back once the misprediction is noticed, this behavior leaves observable side effects which can leak data to an attacker.
In 2019, the team responsible for V8, Chrome’s JavaScript engine, published a blog post and whitepaper concluding that such attacks can’t be reliably mitigated at the software level. Instead, robust solutions to these issues require security boundaries in applications such as web browsers to be aligned with low-level primitives, for example process-based isolation.
In parallel, browser vendors and standards bodies developed security mechanisms to protect web users from these classes of attacks. This included both architectural changes which offer default protections enabled in some browser configurations (such as Site Isolation, out-of-process iframes, and Cross-Origin Read Blocking), as well as broadly applicable opt-in security features that web developers can deploy in their applications: Cross-Origin Resource Policy, Cross-Origin Opener Policy, Cross-Origin Embedder Policy, and others.
These mechanisms, while crucially important, don't prevent the exploitation of Spectre; rather, they protect sensitive data from being present in parts of the memory from which they can be read by the attacker. To evaluate the robustness of these defenses, it's therefore important to develop security tools that help security engineers understand the practical implications of speculative execution attacks for their applications.
Demonstrating Spectre in a web browser
Today, we’re sharing proof-of-concept (PoC) code that confirms the practicality of Spectre exploits against JavaScript engines. We use Google Chrome to demonstrate our attack, but these issues are not specific to Chrome, and we expect that other modern browsers are similarly vulnerable to this exploitation vector. We have developed an interactive demonstration of the attack available at https://leaky.page/; the code and a more detailed writeup are published on Github here.
The demonstration website can leak data at a speed of 1kB/s when running on Chrome 88 on an Intel Skylake CPU. Note that the code will likely require minor modifications to apply to other CPUs or browser versions; however, in our tests the attack was successful on several other processors, including the Apple M1 ARM CPU, without any major changes.
While experimenting, we also developed other PoCs with different properties. Some examples include:
A PoC which can leak 8kB/s of data at a cost of reduced stability using performance.now() as a timer with 5μs precision.
A PoC which leaks data at 60B/s using timers with a precision of 1ms or worse.
We chose to release the current PoC since it has a negligible setup time and works in the absence of high precision timers, such as SharedArrayBuffer.
The main building blocks of the PoC are:
A Spectre gadget: code that triggers attacker-controlled transient execution.
A side-channel: a way to observe side effects of the transient execution.
1. The gadget
For the published PoC, we implemented a simple Variant 1 gadget: a JavaScript array is speculatively accessed out of bounds after training the branch predictor that the compiler-inserted length check will succeed. This particular gadget can be mitigated at the software level; however, Chrome's V8 team concluded that this is not the case for other gadgets: “we found that effective mitigation of some variants of Spectre, particularly variant 4, to be simply infeasible in software.”
We invite the security community to extend our research and develop code that makes use of other Spectre gadgets.
2. The side-channel
A common way to leak secret data via speculative execution is to use a cache side-channel. By observing if a certain memory location is present in the cache or not, we can infer if it has been accessed during the speculative execution. The challenge in JavaScript is to find a high resolution timer allowing to distinguish cache from memory accesses, as modern browsers have reduced the timer granularity of the performance.now() API and disabled SharedArrayBuffers in contexts without cross-origin isolation to prevent timing attacks.
Already in 2018, the V8 team shared their observation that reduced timer granularity is not sufficient to mitigate Spectre, since attackers can arbitrarily amplify timing differences. The presented amplification technique was based on reading secret data multiple times which can, however, reduce the effectiveness of the attack if the information leak is probabilistic.
In our PoC, we developed a new technique that overcomes this limitation. By abusing the behavior of the Tree-PLRU cache eviction strategy commonly found in modern CPUs, we were able to significantly amplify the cache timing with a single read of secret data. This allowed us to leak data efficiently even with low precision timers. For technical details, see the demonstration at https://leaky.page/plru.html.
While we don't believe this particular PoC can be re-used for nefarious purposes without significant modifications, it serves as a compelling demonstration of the risks of Spectre. In particular, we hope it provides a clear signal for web application developers that they need to consider this risk in their security evaluations and take active steps to protect their sites.
Deploying web defenses against Spectre
The low-level nature of speculative execution vulnerabilities makes them difficult to fix comprehensively, as a proper patch can require changes to the firmware or hardware on the user's device. While operating system and web browser developers have implemented important built-in protections where possible (including Site Isolation with out-of-process iframes and Cross-Origin Read Blocking in Google Chrome, or Project Fission in Firefox), the design of existing web APIs still makes it possible for data to inadvertently flow into an attacker's process.
With this in mind, web developers should consider more robustly isolating their sites by using new security mechanisms that actively deny attackers access to cross-origin resources. These protections mitigate Spectre-style hardware attacks and common web-level cross-site leaks, but require developers to assess the threat these vulnerabilities pose to their applications and understand how to deploy them. To assist in that evaluation, Chrome's web platform security team has published Post-Spectre Web Development and Mitigating Side-Channel Attacks with concrete advice for developers; we strongly recommend following their guidance and enabling the following protections:
Cross-Origin Resource Policy (CORP) and Fetch Metadata Request Headers allow developers to control which sites can embed their resources, such as images or scripts, preventing data from being delivered to an attacker-controlled browser renderer process. See resourcepolicy.fyi and web.dev/fetch-metadata.
Cross-Origin Opener Policy (COOP) lets developers ensure that their application window will not receive unexpected interactions from other websites, allowing the browser to isolate it in its own process. This adds an important process-level protection, particularly in browsers which don't enable full Site Isolation; see web.dev/coop-coep.
Cross-Origin Embedder Policy (COEP) ensures that any authenticated resources requested by the application have explicitly opted in to being loaded. Today, to guarantee process-level isolation for highly sensitive applications in Chrome or Firefox, applications must enable both COEP and COOP; see web.dev/coop-coep.
In addition to enabling these isolation mechanisms, ensure your application also enables standard protections, such as the X-Frame-Options and X-Content-Type-Options headers, and uses SameSite cookies. Many Google applications have already deployed, or are in the process of deploying these mechanisms, providing a defense against speculative execution bugs in situations where default browser protections are insufficient.
It's important to note that while all of the mechanisms described in this article are important and powerful security primitives, they don't guarantee complete protection against Spectre; they require a considered deployment approach which takes behaviors specific to the given application into account. We encourage security engineers and researchers to use and contribute to our Spectre proof-of-concept to review and improve the security posture of their sites.
Tip: To help you protect your website from Spectre, the Google Security Team has created Spectroscope, a prototype Chrome extension that scans your application and finds resources which may require enabling additional defenses. Consider using it to assist with your deployments of web isolation features.
Evaluating the security of mobile devices is difficult, and a trusted way to validate a company’s claims is through independent, industry certifications. When it comes to smartphones one of the most rigorous end-to-end certifications is the Common Criteria (CC) Mobile Device Fundamentals (MDF) Protection Profile. Common Criteria is the driving force for establishing widespread mutual recognition of secure IT products across 31 countries . Over the past few years only three smartphone manufacturers have continually been certified on every OS version: Google, Samsung, and Apple. At the beginning of February, we successfully completed this certification for all currently supported Pixel smartphones running Android 11. Google is the first manufacturer to be certified on the latest OS version.
This specific certification is designed to evaluate how a device defends against the real-world threats facing both consumers and businesses. The table below outlines the threats and mitigations provided in the CC MDF protection profile:
Threats
Mitigations
Network Eavesdropping - An attacker is positioned on a wireless communications channel or elsewhere on the network infrastructure
Network Attack - An attacker is positioned on a wireless communications channel or elsewhere on the network infrastructure
Protected Communications - Standard protocols such as IPsec, DTLS, TLS, HTTPS, and Bluetooth to ensure encrypted communications are secure
Authorization and Authentication - Secure authentication for networks and backends
Mobile Device Configuration - Capabilities for configuring and applying security policies defined by the user and/or Enterprise Administrator
Physical Access - An attacker, with physical access, may attempt to retrieve user data on the mobile device, including credentials
Protected Storage - Secure storage (that is, encryption of data-at-rest) for data contained on the device
Authorization and Authentication - Secure device authentication using a known unlock factor, such as a password, PIN, fingerprint, or face authentication
End User Privacy and Device Functionality - Application isolation/sandboxing and framework permissions provide separation and privacy between user activities
What makes this certification important is the fact that it is a hands on evaluation done by an authorized lab to evaluate the device and perform a variety of tests to ensure that:
At a high level, the target of evaluation (TOE) is the combination of device hardware (i.e. system on chip) and operating system (i.e. Android). In order to validate our mitigations for the threats listed above, the lab looks at the following security functionality:
Why this is important for enterprises
It’s incredibly important to ensure Pixel security can specifically support enterprise needs. Many regulated industries require the use of Common Criteria certified devices to ensure that sensitive data is backed by the strongest possible protections. The Android Enterprise management framework enables enterprises to do things like control devices by setting restrictions around what the end user can do and audit devices to ensure all software settings are configured properly. For example, enterprise IT admins wish to enforce policies for features like the camera, location services or app installation process.
Why this is important for consumers
Security isn’t just an enterprise concern and many of the protections validated by Common Criteria certification apply to consumers as well. For example, when you’re connecting to Wi-Fi, you want to ensure no one can spy on your web browsing. If your device is lost or stolen, you want to be confident that your lock screen can reduce the chances of someone accessing your personal information.
We believe in making security & privacy accessible to all of our users. This is why we take care to ensure that Pixel devices meet or exceed these certification standards.. We’re committed to meeting these standards moving forward, so you can rest assured that your Pixel phone comes with top-of-the-line security built in, from the moment you turn it on.
Why this is important to the Android Ecosystem
While certifications are a great form of third party validation, they often fall under what we like to call the 3 C’s:
We have been working these last three years to reduce this complexity for our OEM partners. We are excited to tell you that the features required to satisfy the necessary security requirements are baked directly into the Android Open Source Project. We’ve also added all of the management and auditability requirements into the Android Enterprise Management framework. Last year we started publishing the tools we have developed for this on GitHub to allow other Android OEMs to take advantage of our efforts as they go through their certification.
While we continue certifying Pixel smartphones with new Android OS versions, we have worked to enable other Android OEMs to achieve this certification as well as others, such as:
We’ll continue to invest in additional ways to measure security for both enterprises and consumers, and we welcome the industry to join us in this effort.
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