Google says it will open source the firmware for Titan M, the secure chip in Pixel 3 phones that handles Verified Boot and has its own isolated storage and RAM
Brian Barrett / Wired : Tweets: @wired Tweets: @wired : The Titan M chip may be small and discreet, but its ability to protect against the most sophisticated and devastating attacks helps make the Pixel 3 and the Pixel 3 XL among the most secure smartphones you can buy. http://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's Titan line began as a datacenter product — specs for a chip that scans servers for tampering were promised back in August 2017 — and has since spread into consumer hardware. Weeks before this announcement, Google was defending its Titan Security Keys over their Chinese manufacturing while security experts pressed for more transparency, arguing that firmware, not factory location, is what guarantees security (that controversy is the immediate backdrop here).
Opening the Titan M firmware — the code running the Pixel 3's secure element that enforces Verified Boot from isolated storage and RAM — is Google converting that transparency argument into practice. It also prefigures where the company took root-of-trust design next: the OpenTitan project with lowRISC a year later made open, auditable silicon an explicit goal.
First-order effects
- Independent security researchers can now audit the actual firmware enforcing Verified Boot on Pixel 3 devices, rather than trusting Google's descriptions of it — directly substantiating the 'most secure smartphones' claim Wired highlights.
- The move hands Google a concrete answer to the transparency criticism it faced over the Titan Security Keys' Chinese manufacture: the trust argument shifts from who builds the chip to whether the code can be verified.
Second-order effects
- Rival phone makers shipping closed secure elements face pressure to match the disclosure standard, since 'auditable firmware' becomes a marketable differentiator for Pixel security positioning.
- Suppliers and contract manufacturers of secure chips gain less pricing leverage from opacity — if Google treats firmware openness as table stakes, secrecy about implementation stops being a selling point across the component market.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, root-of-trust silicon consolidates around open, community-audited designs rather than vendor-secret ones — the trajectory OpenTitan formalized for datacenter hardware, extending the same logic from phones to servers.
- Hardware trust increasingly rests on verifiable code plus physical isolation (dedicated storage and RAM) rather than on the manufacturer's assurances, reshaping how regulators and enterprise buyers evaluate device security claims.
The trend: Root-of-trust hardware is moving from proprietary black boxes toward openly auditable firmware and shared open-source silicon designs, with Google using transparency as both a security argument and a competitive weapon.