[Android] New flashing method based on exploits

Created by: ollieparanoid

There are Android devices, where the bootloader needs to be unlocked first, and I think in some case it isn't even possible to unlock them. It would be nice, if we could also flash postmarketOS to these devices, but we would need to exploit the old kernels first.

Relevant links:

• Exploits ready to use for Android

I've been planning to make an Awesome Root project with a collection of rooting resources, perhaps we could team up?

When I saw this issue I figured I should get started already, here's what I've come up with in 50 minutes: https://gitlab.com/willemmali/awesome-root

I have to get back to work now (busy week) but I'm very interested in making the rooting of Android devices significantly easier and I think we could both benefit from concentrating our efforts.

By Ghost User on 2017-06-21T09:24:53

@ollieparanoid don't those exploits give you root access inside android instead of unlocking the bootloader?

By Martijn Braam on 2017-06-21T09:28:36

Created by: ollieparanoid

@MartijnBraam you are right, I have oversimplified this. Getting root access over adb could be a possible entry point (and maybe it is possible to flash other partitions with dd from there once we somehow disable SELinux), but we still need to unlock (or even replace) the bootloader to run unsigned code.

It doesn't make sense for me at this state of the project to put any focus on this (because I have not done enough research on this topic) and if pmOS gets to seriously work in this area at some point in the future, we should team up with the people who have already hacked bootloaders such as HTC's hboot before (some related links).

@WillemMali: thanks for posting your project. Maybe we can use that in some combination to unlock bootloaders (but only gaining root is really not enough, as stated above). I have tagged this issue with the future label, so this is more of a thing to do in the (far) future, when pmOS has advanced a lot, so I can not work on unlocking bootloaders as of now (speaking for me only, maybe someone who is also involved with pmOS does want to do this right now). We have some sort of milestone plan here. When your project matures and becomes useful for postmarketOS I would be happy to package it though, so it could be simply installed and used.

By * postmarketOS Bot on 2017-06-21T17:17:55

Created by: ollieparanoid

So what we actually need to do, is exploiting or replacing the bootloader, like it is done here (WIP): https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Coolpad_Modena_2_(coolpad-modena2)

This issue is too abstract to be helpful right now, closing.

By * postmarketOS Bot on 2017-09-02T22:05:04

mentioned in issue #176 (closed)

By Robert Eckelmann on 2024-08-16T01:03:16