Google buys small company that tests GPU drivers for security

Google has acquired British company GraphicsFuzz. The three employees will work for the Android Graphics team. The company specializes in testing the security of GPU drivers and will integrate its technology into Android.

GraphicsFuzz reports the acquisition on its own website. Financial details have not been disclosed. The British company has developed methods to test GPU drivers largely automatically, in order to quickly find bugs that could pose a security risk.

The start-up showed at the end of 2016 that it could exploit found bugs via WebGL. When devices with a vulnerable driver visited a prepared page, it resulted in a reboot or hang. GraphicsFuzz has found such vulnerabilities in GPU drivers for various mobile devices and also PCs.

Also in 2016, the team discovered a way to read the contents of other tabs via a bug in the gpu driver of the Samsung Galaxy S6 in Google’s Chrome browser, when a prepared WebGL page was visited on the phone. The GraphicsFuzz team was rewarded for this at the time through Google’s bug bounty program.