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T-Mobile G1 Rooted
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Nov 05, 2008 10:35 AM
from the that-didn't-take-long dept.
from the that-didn't-take-long dept.
An anonymous reader writes "T-Mobile's G1 phone, the first commercially available Android based phone, has been rooted. The exploit is extremely simple to execute, just requiring you to run telnetd from a terminal on the phone, and then connecting to the phone via telnet."
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Submission: T-Mobile G1 root access acheived! by Anonymous Coward
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Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rooted? (Score:4, Insightful)
News Flash
Houses are rootable. If you unlock your doors and hang out a 'rob me' sign, people can break in.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:4, Insightful)
If the door's unlocked, it's hardly "breaking in," is it?
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Informative)
If the door's unlocked, it's hardly "breaking in," is it?
Yes it is.
The "Breaking" part of "Breaking & Entering" refers to breaking the plane of entry, not physically damaging anything.
"Breaking" is not actually a separate action from "Entering". The reason they are used together is for clarity...one word derives from Old English, and the other word derives from French. Writing laws this way was useful when the Normans and Saxons were trying to cohabitate on the same island.
There are many legal terms constructed the same way:
Null and void
Cease and desist
Last Will and Testament
Aid and Abet
Goods and Chattels
Terms and Conditions
etc.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
Null and void
These are very different things, at least if you are a C programmer.
Parent
In addition to... (Score:5, Funny)
So are Terms and Conditions.
Terms are the things around your pluses and minuses.
Conditions (in my interpretation) are expressions of an integral type inside a conditional statement.
I wouldn't want to handle volatile chemicals or long johns or union jacks if I'm about to get struct bylightning. Happened to me once, a long long time ago.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
Your right, dammit. Should be "NULL && void*".
Wow, that's two languages in which you've completely failed. In less than sixty characters.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Informative)
Erm.... Breaking and entering is exactly what it says. Just entering is call trespassing, and just breaking is called criminal damage. Don't ask me how I know :).
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
How do you know?
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:4, Funny)
That reminds me of the van owner that put up a sign saying 'No tools or valuables inside'
The next morning it had been broken into and the theives had left a note saying 'Just checking'
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:4, Funny)
No. Needs citation and permanent link to reputable source. We will then run it past the legal department and conduct a full analysis of all facts and observations and, upon filing the requisite forms, of course, only then will we consider your suggestion of "humor". Please allow the standard six to eight weeks for the laugh.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. Non-story. This is just stupid.
Excuse me sir... I would like to hack into your phone. Could you please type this in for me...
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair though, lots of people /are/ stupid enough to fall for this kind of thing... consider how well that "I love you" worm or whatever it was did a few years back.
With the right method, I'm sure you could con people into doing something silly with an Offical-sounding text message, and then exploit it.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
i dunno. tech support operators have a hard enough time walking the average person through how to run ipconfig on their windows PCs. trying to get the average person to open a terminal in Linux to run anything would be like trying to walk a cow down a flight of stairs.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The FUNNIEST jokes!
REAL horoscopes tailored for YOU!
Sports! Fashion! Celebrity gossip! Keno numbers!
Just text FAIL to 37528!
Sign up now and get a free spinning rim background!
SPECIAL BONUS for G1 owners!
After texting FAIL to 37528, open up telnet to receive your mystery gift!
Text FAIL to 37528, TODAY!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> Agreed. Non-story. This is just stupid.
Guess you didn't actually read the material. This shouldn't work but somehow a privledge escalation is allowing a non-root user to invoke telnetd and then to connect from outside and actually get a root shell. So the owner of the hardware is able to break int T-Mobile's software. Oh the horror!
So far it is more likely to simply get patched instead of developing into a full jailbreak but stay tuned. The camel's nose has entered the tent, it just might be able t
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
in related news, researchers have discovered that if you open a root console on any flavour of linux and stick the keyboard out a window anyone walking by will be able to gain root access to you machine.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:4, Informative)
And it also works in the other way... you can put your already rooted equipment into any window, and anybody inside that house will be able to gain root access, and also call the
police
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly, we should avoid using windows.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Insightful)
The much better question is: why is there a telnetd on the phone in the first place?
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because telnetd has some tiny fraction of the system overhead of ssh daemons, even "tiny" ones.
Parent
Re:Rooted? (Score:5, Funny)
"System overhead"? Oh please.
Do try to stay on topic: we're not talking about low-capability embedded devices, we're talking about a cellphone!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
CPU usage for an SSH daemon during an interactive session, while it probably is higher than a telnet daemon, is still low enough (0.005% instead of 0.001%, perhaps?) that it'll most likely get lost in the noise. I have dropbear running on a WRT54GL, and it has no trouble keeping up. The trivial CPU usage is worth the added security. It might crunch a bit more during session setup when it's using public-key encr
I haven't followed the whole Android business, but (Score:5, Funny)
...wasn't this supposed to be an open platform anyway? I don't quite get it.
Re:I haven't followed the whole Android business, (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, I fail for not RTFA. They are misusing "rooted", which confused me. "rooted" in the popular [geek] vernacular means that a remote non-admin user can gain root access, such as through a buffer overflow exploit. It has nothing to do with the practice of gaining root access on your own devices.
Parent
Re:I haven't followed the whole Android business, (Score:5, Insightful)
What's next, "open"?
Parent
Re:I haven't followed the whole Android business, (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget "bricked".
Bricked used to mean you took the piece of equipment out to the firing range for its final trouble "shooting".
Now it means you just press the reset button.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Coral to the rescue (Score:4, Interesting)
Coral Cache [nyud.net]
On a side note... a hyphenated domain name! How retro...
Re:Coral to the rescue (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Coral to the rescue (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never understood why so many web programmers insist on parsing E-mail addresses, very few are capable of doing it correctly. I usually use splab+someidentification@mydomain.tld - this way I can track where I submitted the address they got - but since programmers insists on parsing the E-mail address they almost always considers + to be invalid.
Just send the person a confirmation E-mail and bobs your uncle.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As for validating emails, check that there's at least one @ and that the part after th
Bad Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wait...so.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wait...so.... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
No, you don't have to run as root first. (Score:5, Informative)
It's apparently weirder than that. Running "telnetd" as an ordinary user apparently allows remote logins as root. This happens even though the "telnetd" executable does not apparently come with permissions set-UID to root. If that's correct, there's a security hole somewhere else that's being used by accident here. Is "login" a set-UID program on Android phones?
(As a robotics guy, I hate the name "Android" being used for a telephone. It's the worst choice since "U.S. Robotics" which ended up as a modem company.)
Parent
Re:No, you don't have to run as root first. (Score:4, Interesting)
Just about everyone in the robotics community calls them humanoid robots anyway. "Android" and "droid" are pretty much confined to sci-fi, and by the time we have real androids, I'm pretty sure this phone OS will be a thing of the past. Sure, Ishiguro's current work in this area is pretty interesting, but even those robots are only mistaken for humans from a distance, and they aren't mobile.
Parent
This is like saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is like saying something is "bricked" when it's just a bad firmware flash that can be fixed.
The phone isn't rooted. Rooted means someone gained root access through an exploit and/or installed a root kit. Running telnetd and then connecting as root is a normal method of logging in, no exploits required.
Or are they saying every UNIX system that has a method of remote access is rooted?
Re:This is like saying... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I found an exploit to alter the root password on Unix systems. It's really simple. You just login or su to root, then run the command 'passwd'. Works every time.
Parent
Re:This is like saying... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, given that it's a device that isn't designed to be root-accessible by the user, this did require somebody to do something that the manufacturer didn't intend in order to gain root access.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They left Telnetd on it? (Score:4, Insightful)
What???
Telnetd is one of those things that should just be deleted from every system that it is on.
Just use SSH folks.
Whole lot of stupid going on in these replies .. (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of this exploit isn't so you can remotely hack other people's phones, it's so mobile hackers can get to a lower level than Android permits users to do, which will allow them to flash the phone with unsigned custom updates and what not and customise their phone more.
People should really read the articles and smarten up.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
People should really read the articles and smarten up.
You must be new here.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I claim this first root post for Spain!
Re:hmnn? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Next time, just run out and patent the idea. You could make some money.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Does this mean that telnetd is setuid root, or does it mean that you already have to have root to get root?
Neither. That is why this article is news.