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You might think that you’re a pretty careful user when it comes to surfing the web, making sure you don’t click on suspicious links, or download email attachments from unknown sources, but the fact of the matter is that there will always be hacks and malware that can hide themselves better than you think.
This means that there is always a chance that even though your phone appears to be behaving normally, there’s a slim possibility that it could still have been hacked. The good news is that if you own a Pixel phone, Google has released a new tool called “Pixel Binary Transparency” that lets you check if your phone might have been hacked.
It should be noted that Google already has a feature for Android phones called Android Verified Boot. This lets users check if their firmware comes from a trusted source. With this new “Pixel Binary Transparency” feature, users can now check if the firmware on their phones might have been compromised even before they got their hands on it, like if the manufacturer might have installed a compromised version of Android.
“Pixel Binary Transparency is a public, cryptographic log that records metadata about official factory images. With this log, Pixel users can mathematically prove that their Pixels are running factory images that match what Google released and haven’t been tampered with.”
Google says that most users probably don’t need to use this tool, but we suppose having an additional way of checking isn’t the worst thing in the world. Users who are curious can find details and instructions on Google’s developer page.
Source: Google
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