Presented at
DEF CON 31 (2023),
Aug. 11, 2023, 1 p.m.
(45 minutes)
To ensure Google Pixel devices are always at their most secure, the Android Red Team continuously attacks the riskiest areas of the phone. This allows us to proactively get ahead of bugs and protect the phone, before it’s even shipped to users.
The modem — or baseband — is considered a fundamental component of smartphones, and is at high risk because it is a privileged system component that accepts data from an untrusted remote source (cell towers). A vulnerability in the modem exposes end-users to scalable attacks carried out remotely, which may lead to many kinds of compromise on a phone.
Modem security is currently a hot topic of research, attracting growing interest from security researchers, both in the industry and in academia. This wasn’t the case up until recently for a couple of reasons: most modem code is closed source, and testing it requires expensive hardware equipment. With some of these barriers being removed in recent years, due the invention of software-defined radio (SDR) devices and public toolkits, the entry level into baseband security analysis has become more affordable. In this session the Android Red Team will be describing some findings from its offensive evaluation of modems used in Pixel devices.
Presenters:
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Eugene Rodionov
- Security Researcher on the Android Red Team at Google
Eugene Rodionov, PhD, is a Security Researcher at Google on the Android Red Team. In his current position, Eugene focuses on finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in the low-level components of Android platform and Pixel devices. Prior to that, Rodionov performed offensive security research on UEFI firmware for Client Platforms at Intel, and ran internal research projects and performed in-depth analysis of complex threats at ESET. His fields of interest include reverse engineering, vulnerability analysis, firmware security and anti-rootkit technologies. Rodionov is a co-author of the "Rootkits and Bootkits: Reversing Modern Malware and Next Generation Threats" book and has spoken at security conferences such as Black Hat, REcon, ZeroNights, and CARO.
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Xiling Gong
- Security Researcher on the Android Red Team at Google
Xiling Gong is a Security Researcher at Google on the Android Red Team. Xiling focuses on finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in the low-level components of Android platform and Pixel devices. Xiling is the speaker of CanSecWest 2018, BlackHat USA 2019, Def Con 27, BlackHat Asia 2021.
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Xuan Xing
- Tech Lead on the Android Red Team at Google
Xuan Xing is the tech lead of the Android Red Team at Google. For the past years, Xuan focused on finding security vulnerabilities in various low level components of Android/Pixel devices. He is passionate about software fuzzing for security research. In BlackHat USA 2022 Xuan presented the “Google Reimagined a Phone. It was Our Job to Red Team and Secure it” talking about Pixel ABL security auditing.
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Farzan Karimi
- Android Offensive Security Manager at Google
Farzan Karimi has over 15 years experience in offensive security. He is the Android Offensive Security Manager at Google. In this role, he manages red team operations targeting low-level components within the Android ecosystem. Farzan has specialized in exploiting game development consoles (devkits). His work on PlayStation and Xbox led to the development of key security features for next generation platforms. Farzan is a speaker at security conferences such as Black Hat USA, LABSCON, Microsoft STRIKE, and EA Team Blue.
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