Google has started working to harden the security of Android at the firmware level, a component of the software stack that interacts directly with the various processors of a system on a chip (SoC).
The plan is to expand the security in Android devices beyond the operating system, which runs on a multi-core CPU, to the other processors on the SoC for dedicated tasks like cellular communication, media processing, or security modules.
This decision was fueled by security research lately focusing on various components of the software stack, including the firmware.
Among more notable examples are attacks targeting vulnerabilities in the secondary processors such as the Wi-Fi or cellular modules that could be exploited remotely over the air to inject and execute arbitrary code.
