Android 9 Brings Significant Security Advancements, Google Says

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The latest Android iteration brings along a great deal of security improvements, including better encryption and authentication, Google says.

With Android 9 (also called Android Pie), the Internet search giant focused on aspects such as platform hardening, anti-exploitation, hardware-backed security, and user privacy, each with its own set of enhancements and new features.

Released this fall, the platform iteration brought updated File-Based Encryption, now offering support for external storage media. Metadata encryption with hardware support was also included, along with a new BiometricPrompt API, to have the biometric authentication dialogs that apps can display look the same.

There are also new protections for the Application Sandbox, with per-app cryptographic authentication to the sandbox, to improve app separation and prevent overriding safe defaults. Furthermore, apps are prevented from making data widely accessible.

Android Pie arrived with Control Flow Integrity (CFI) enabled by default within the media frameworks and other security-critical components, to prevent changes to the original control flow graph of compiled code. Google also added support for CFI to the Android kernel.

In a post published on Thursday, Google also underlines the presence of Integer Overflow Sanitization in Android 9, a security technique to mitigate memory corruption and information disclosure vulnerabilities that are the result of integer operations.

Source: https://www.securityweek.com/android-9-b...oogle-says