The Google Pixel 3 has all the betterments[1] you would expect from a flashy flagship smartphone: great camera, zippy processor, smarter AI. It also, though, comes with an unexpected bonus, one that works so deeply in the background you’ll likely never even know it’s there. The Titan M chip may be small and discreet, but it helps make the Pixel 3 and its beefier sibling, the Pixel 3 XL, among the most secure smartphones you can buy.
The Titan M draws inspiration from the Titan chip[2] that helps safeguard Google servers, and while they differ some in the details—the Titan M draws much less power, for instance, so as not to tax your battery—they both share the task of protecting hardware against the most sophisticated, and devastating, attacks. And because it sits entirely apart from the Pixel 3's main processor, it helps cordon off the most sensitive data your smartphone holds.
"Once the tools are there and the knowledge is there, the attacks will tickle down."
Will Drewry, Google
One such attack the Titan M is designed to protect against is the boot-time attack. “If you put yourself in the shoes of an attacker, the earlier you can interfere in the process, the more power you have, generally. If you can interfere when the chip is being manufactured, that’s phenomenal,” says Simha Sethumadhavan, a computer scientist at Columbia University. “If you cannot do that, the other place to do it is when the system is booting. When the system is booting, it’s initializing and needs to run at the highest privilege. It’s a super convenient place for the attacker to interfere. They can get access to all the happenings in the system.”
Titan M heads off these boot-time attacks by tying into Verified