By Ryan Whitwam
Publication Date: 2026-04-13 21:12:00
Rust doesn’t have a slow garbage collector. Instead, it uses a mechanism called the borrow checker that ensures memory safety at compile time. This strict set of rules ensures that you can’t “forget” to free up memory—code simply won’t compile if the memory rules are breached. This is what makes Rust a memory-safe language.
However, not even Google can wave its proverbial hand and change how modem firmware is written—we’re talking about tens of megabytes of executable machine code, which is a lot. Not only would it be a herculean task to update decades of work, but many of the companies involved also consider the inner workings of modems to be trade secrets.
To protect the Pixel modem from zero-day attacks, Google focused on the DNS parser. As cellular features have migrated to data networks, DNS has become a core part of how phones work. Google explains that DNS requires parsing of untrusted data, and that makes it a major security concern,…
