Hackers working on cracking the Googlephone's firmware
T-Mobile's new Google Android phone, the G1, is not as open as you'd hope -- all the good hardware is sandboxed off from the development environment and requires a signature to run. But hackers are already working to crack open the firmware. From the #android channel on Freenode:
The T-Mobile G1 — nice phone, but not totally openI hacked my camera's firmware manually by using an exploit to cause it to execute arbitrary code - and then blinking out the entire firmware in 0's and 1's on the autofocus LED - read in by a photo transistor attached to a sound cable plugged into my microphone port - and then put back into 0's and 1's...
Then disassembled the ARM9 code in it and worked on porting CHDK to it...
I'm pretty sure having a whole OS at my disposal should make this a lot easier
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I'm sorry, but that hack sounds a little to awesome to be true. I'm gonna to need some more evidence that that guy wasn't simply making stuff up before I start believing it.
Awesome that they're hacking G1 though! Good on ya!
Google: "Look it'll be open source. Aweosme!"
Hackers: "WTF?! That's not open."
Google: "..."
Hackers: "Ah, there we go, now This is open!"
I do so WANT it to be true.
Oskar@#1:
Well, CHDK ( http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK ) is a real thing, I have it on my canon camera, and yes, they used LED blinkers to get the firmware out to do the initial hacking.
I don't actually see how this relates to the T-Mobile G1 though. I thought that was a phone. Unless it's just an anecdote showing how far hackers will go.
While not completely open, I think it is at least some positive progress in the direction of having more phones having open source software. This phone/technology isn't worth switching over to T-mobile right now, but as long as they're moving forward, I can definitely see switching sometime in the near future.
irc log as a news piece? please
I'm not sure that people are quite aware yet what a nightmare it could be to have a phone where the whole phone is open. Sure it would be pretty sweet if you are a hacker who knows what is going on, you have total control of the phone and can do some amazing things. On the other hand there is a much larger number of people who know just enough to be dangerous. When Joe Iphone follows some internet tutorial on how to crack your Gphone, he might be opening a whole 'nother can of worms.
I guess you make that choice when you crack your phone. I foresee some serious gnashing of teeth when people start installing software that sends tens of thousands of spam text messages at 20 cents a pop. And I'm not sure that the carriers are going to be completely forgiving since you cracked your phone open in the first place.
And that's a pretty benign scenario. The best would be some kind of worm that would reside somewhere in the firmware and communicate via the data network. Now that's good times!
I don't have any problem with people hacking things, I'm a firm believer in the idea that if you buy something you should be able to do whatever you want with it. But this seems like a slow motion car crash unfolding in front of my eyes. Caveat cracker, I guess.
That is so touching ... the poor crippled phone blinking out its firmware one bit at a time to a patient listener, just like the guy in "The Diving Bell And The Butterfly" ...
Whoa whoa whoa, things got mixed up here.
The CHDK "dump through IR led" hack is true (as far as anything posted on a blog is).
However, it has absolutely nothing to do with Android or the Googlephone: CHDK is a Canon DSLR firmware hack/upgrade.
I'm calling bullshit on this one. Everyone calm down.
I call bullshit. While I concede, that the firmware for the phone is not open, the android platform and SDK is, so it would be much-much easier to read the source for adb and find out how to do a firmware dump (could it be that the file named /etc/firmware/brf6300.bin that I see on my G1 is it?) then to blink some several megabytes of binary one bit a a time. I mean this would be a great art project, but a very inefficient hack. I would say that someone on #android (channel, I spend some time on) was joking.
I can't verify that this is what was done in this case, but I can corroborate that this method has been used in the past for other devices. I've also heard of some network 'eavesdropping' methods that do the same thing, to monitor the blinkenlights of a router with a high-speed camera, but I don't know how successful that was.
Letting the device trickle the data out seems to me at the same time brilliant and maddening. Once it is done, however, it hopefully opens the door to much speedier methods.
Also, is there not an over-the-air upgrade coming soon for the G1s? Finding a way of capturing that may be useful as well.
He's not saying that he's doing the LED-flashing trick with Android -- he's comparing having the entire OS as a build (the case with Android) compare to previous attempts to reverse-engineer firmware using CHDK. The point is that it will be (hopefully) far *easier* on the G1, but the same people are looking at it.
The important part is highlighting that anyone has has this at all: a really open phone would let you flash your own firmware in a documented, open way.
Again, this bullshit.
They're talking about the SDK. The firmware IS open source and available at source.android.com
Thank you come again.
I think Danny O'Brien @#12 is the only one that has actually read what this guy is saying.
RyeBrye - I hacked my camera's firmware manually by using an exploit to cause it to execute arbitrary code - and then blinking out the entire firmware in 0's and 1's on the autofocus LED - read in by a photo transistor attached to a sound cable plugged into my microphone port - and then put back into 0's and 1's...
RyeBrye - I'm pretty sure having a whole OS at my disposal should make this a lot easier
He's stating he's glad he won't have to do the blinking light thing again