Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OEMpocalypse: Unprivileged Android app to root on Samsung, Xiaomi, others

calif.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 62 posts

Re: OEMpocalypse: Unprivileged Android app to root on Samsung, Xiaomi, others

#31

Post by user_7832 »

_ZeD_ wrote: post #7

will the "exploit" app be available? asking for a friend :D

Depends on your phone, but for some qualcomm devices there was a vulnerability some time ago, iirc the OnePlus 15 has a dedicated thread on XDA. I also found this on XDA while trying to find the other exploit:

https://xdaforums.com/t/the-holy-grail-universal-no-bl-root-...

Side note, it's quite ironic, google being so heavily anti-root is forcing people to opt for root access via more hidden ways, making it easier to avoid root being detected.

Re: OEMpocalypse: Unprivileged Android app to root on Samsung, Xiaomi, others

#32

Post by shocks »

gorgmah wrote: post #26
throwa356262 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some apps such as Aegis allow exporting the MFA secrets.

I think they allow importing from Authy but only on rooted phones. I missed the train to move away from Authy in 2024 and now the only non-root option is to regenerate the seed from every provider one by one. As other commenters said, rooting my main phone would lock me out of banking apps. I suppose I could find an old phone, sync from authy cloud, root it, and then migrate, but then generating new seeds is probably…

You can extract keys out of Authy using mitm-proxy. I have done it and switched to Bitwarden.

Re: OEMpocalypse: Unprivileged Android app to root on Samsung, Xiaomi, others

#34

Post by gorgmah »

shocks wrote: post #32
gorgmah wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they allow importing from Authy but only on rooted phones. I missed the train to move away from Authy in 2024 and now the only non-root option is to regenerate the seed from every provider one by one. As other commenters said, rooting my main phone would lock me out of banking apps. I suppose I could find an old phone, sync from authy cloud, root it, and then migrate, but then generating new seeds is probably…

You can extract keys out of Authy using mitm-proxy. I have done it and switched to Bitwarden.

Good point, sadly ios only, I'm on android: https://ente.com/help/auth/migration/authy/ Or do you mean it also works on android but not documented?

Re: OEMpocalypse: Unprivileged Android app to root on Samsung, Xiaomi, others

#35

Post by applfanboysbgon »

> Here, I describe the one I took and why, measured against three properties I use as a yardstick throughout

Nope nope nope. LLMs helped you do something cool, great. You can still speak for yourself. Stop outsourcing your humanity to a chatbot.

> In practice the coverage of each chain is exactly the set of devices the OEM chose to ship the vulnerable component on.

Wonderful insight, Claude. "The vulnerability covers exactly the devices that are vulnerable".

Re: OEMpocalypse: Unprivileged Android app to root on Samsung, Xiaomi, others

#36

Post by negura »

izacus wrote: post #23
gorgmah wrote: post #15

Slightly unrelated: is it relatively safe to root android phones nowadays or should I stick to the unrooted standard android? The reason I'm asking is that I'm stuck with authy as a MFA code app, and would like to move to something that has both desktop and phone support, and my conclusion is I'd need to root my phone to get access to the actual MFA seeds (they don't allow exports to keep you stuck in their app).

It was never particularly safe to root the phone - both because it drills a hole into the security model and because you don't have any good ways of verifying what apps asking for root actually do. Moreover, most of root tools and ROMs are rather poorly written and glued together with other forum scripts which you have no way of checking if they're not malware. (There are exceptions.) So no, "safe" it's not and never…

Not sure why this is downvoted. It's accurate. A major problem is that when you root you loose assurance of the integrity of your /system partition. That means malware can now persist undetected.

Re: OEMpocalypse: Unprivileged Android app to root on Samsung, Xiaomi, others

#37

Post by sega_sai »

I think old Android phones not supported by their makers are so problematic in the LLM era. I would think that even before LLMs the 3 letter agencies had exploits for those, but now one should assume common criminals will... I am happy that the pixel phone I got has 7 year of support, but it is clear that Apple is in general is much better in this than all the Android providers (including google)

Re: OEMpocalypse: Unprivileged Android app to root on Samsung, Xiaomi, others

#38

Post by bayindirh »

sega_sai wrote: post #37

I think old Android phones not supported by their makers are so problematic in the LLM era. I would think that even before LLMs the 3 letter agencies had exploits for those, but now one should assume common criminals will... I am happy that the pixel phone I got has 7 year of support, but it is clear that Apple is in general is much better in this than all the Android providers (including google)

I keep my old iPhone X powered on as a handheld gaming device. It still gets software patches now and then. Funnily, even though the device is in its forsaken era, most of the applications I used to use daily still gets updates too.

Not being able to update an app on it is a rarity.

Re: OEMpocalypse: Unprivileged Android app to root on Samsung, Xiaomi, others

#39

Post by Gander5739 »

FrequentLurker wrote: post #28

I wonder if there is a vulnerability that allows for toggling wireless adb. I have an LG with android 12 which technically should support wireless ADB but LG stripped the option from settings. Some say they stripped out the feature entirely. On top of that the USB port is damaged and doesnt accept data but still accepts power. So no wired adb either.

What's stopping you from rooting it and then sshing in? You can then run the adb commands using root access.
Post reply on HN