Pixel 8 & Pixel 8 Pro to Feature an Exclusive Setting in Android 14

The Android 14 Developer Preview has been released, and in it, XDA’s Mishaal Rahman has found a new security feature dubbed Advanced Memory Protection. This is meant to guard against memory safety vulnerabilities on mobile devices. Google defines these as “errors in handling memory in native programming languages,” and says that they “are the most common issue in the Android codebases. They account for over 60% of high severity security vulnerabilities and for millions of user-visible crashes.”

The functionality may be found under Settings > Security & privacy > More security settings if you currently use the Android 14 developer preview or when you get a build in the future. Memory tagging will be activated on compatible Android 14 devices when it is enabled.

Advanced Memory Protection Option | Image: XDA Developers

Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) is a required hardware feature of ARM v9 CPUs that defends against memory safety vulnerabilities by delivering thorough information about memory infractions. The new Android 14 feature enables Memory Tagging Extension on compatible ArmV8.5+ devices.

At a high level, MTE tags each memory allocation/deallocation with additional metadata. It assigns a tag to a memory location, which can then be associated with pointers that reference that memory location. At runtime the CPU checks that the pointer and the metadata tags match on each load and store

Google

The Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro will not be able to utilize this function since the Google Tensor 2 processor that drives the Pixel 7 series employs ARM’s V8.2 CPU cores. Therefore, the Pixel 8 models, which are not anticipated to be released until the fourth quarter of this year, maybe the first smartphones to include this Android 14 memory protection.

This requires the Tensor 3 chip to use ARM V9 CPU cores similar to those found on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipsets. That is supposing Google leaves the functionality in place until Android 14’s stable version is released. If it does, Pixel 8 lineup will be the first smartphones to adopt the feature.

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