Android/Root

= Android Rooting =

A majority of android devices are locked down and therefore cannot be updated with community-supported patches and upgrades.

All major rooting apps are proprietary and therefore cannot be entirely trusted.

Introduction
rage: One thing has been troubling me about Android development. Installing a custom recovery or rom is possible using fastboot. However, there seems to be no open source application for gaining root access on a device.

0sm0sis: As for rooting/bootloader unlocking using vulnerabilities, that's a whole other game. You basically need an escalation vulnerability to get a root prompt and then, if possible, unlock the bootloader from there, and that's why they generally remain closed-source, since they don't want to disclose their vulnerabilities and risk the OEM patching them before they can spread it.

heroxbd: Yeah, that is an unfortunate status quo.

rage: Hmm, so I get what you're saying about the vulnerabilities, but using a proprietary utility to achieve root access, for the purpose of liberating my device from proprietary software seems a bit backwards to me.

rage: A big problem that I have is that the more popular devices usually have many utilities, while less popular ones don't have anything at all. If there were a framework that could fetch exploits for a given device then it would be trivial to add new devices to the tool.

rage: Maybe we could write one as part of our toolchain?

heroxbd: That would be very useful. Please go ahead.

External resources

 * Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195)
 * Drammer
 * Erodov forums: How to Root Any Android Device Manually
 * Metasploit
 * Pentoo
 * XDA Forums: [UNIVERSAL GUIDE Root Any Android Device Manually !]