Overview
- Google on Tuesday said Pixel 10 phones ship with a Rust-based DNS parser inside the modem to reduce an entire class of memory errors.
- DNS in cellular networks parses untrusted data and helps route features like call forwarding, which makes unsafe parsers a common path to remote code execution.
- Google chose the open-source hickory-proto library and reworked it for bare-metal no_std use, adding about 371 KB to the firmware.
- Engineers bridged the Rust parser to existing C and C++ code through a defined API and changed the build and link process after early optimizations caused power and performance issues that were fixed before release.
- The company says this is a first step toward more memory-safe components in the baseband, though the added size may limit use on tighter embedded platforms.