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Rick Osterloh, Google's senior vice president of hardware, talks about the Titan M security chip at the Pixel 3 event last week.
Sarah Tew / CNET
Google calls the Pixel 3 its most secure phone to date. On Android, there is not much competition.
At Google's Pixel 3 event in New York last Tuesday, the company announced that its latest phones would be the first devices to have its security chip Titan M. If the name sounds familiar, it's because Google has announced the Titan chip for its cloud servers in 2017; It aims to protect services such as Gmail and Google Drive from cyberattacks.
In July, Google also announced the Titan security key, which does not use the Titan chip.
The Pixel 3 would be the first time that Google's security chip is in the hands of ordinary citizens, because the old Titan chip was used only internally, in Google's data centers. In a blog post on Wednesday, Google explains in detail how the Titan M works and why it makes Pixel 3 the most secure Android phone you can get.
Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, also has a bad reputation for security after years of vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities.
Its open platform, which allowed users to freely install applications of their choice and manufacturers to pre-install applications, was also a source of security concerns. It also does not help that if Google releases security updates to fix new vulnerabilities, not everyone has the latest version of Android and therefore does not receive it.
For comparison, Apple's iOS, with its restricted App Store and its sandboxed environment, dealt with far fewer security issues. For years, Apple relied on a hardware security measure called Secure Enclave, a key manager isolated from the main processor and storing encrypted keys.
The Titan M chip is its own dedicated chip and is not part of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, which already has its own security features.
The chip introduces verified startup on Android phones, feature that has been used on Chromebooks for years and is designed to secure devices at startup. This is to ensure that your phone and the applications you use have not been tampered with by hackers.
In the past, hackers were able to use the vulnerabilities of Android to demote a phone to a less secure version, thus making it more vulnerable to attack. The Titan M chip is designed to prevent this and prevent any updates unless the owner enters a password on the device.
The chip is also looking to protect the lockscreen password from Pixel 3 by encrypting and storing security keys on the hardware.
In addition, it creates and stores private keys for third-party applications and payments. According to Google, these security checks mean that one day you will be able to vote online safely, mentioning eVoting as one of the new possibilities offered in his blog post.
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