logo
logo
Sign in

Android Rooting Using ADB

avatar
Dennis Turpitka
Android Rooting Using ADB

You have an Android Device and you are familiar with Linux-based operating systems. Maybe, you like SSH or telnet to communicate with the device; you want to setup your device as a router to connect home PC to the Internet. However, you will be surprised. Android has neither login screen nor possibility to gain privileged user access to the system to do these things. This is one of the Android security principles to isolate applications from the user, each other, and the system.

In this article, I will describe you how to obtain root access on Android device in spite of security, so basically we will discuss some Android exploit development tips. I will delve deeply into one of the Android rooting principles - the adb exhaustion attack, one of the Andoid vulnerabilities, which is simpler to understand than a previous udev exploit. It is suitable for all Android-powered devices with the version 2.2 and lower.

 

 

Android rooting explained: principles

Overview

In three words, the main rooting idea is to get super user rights on a device shell. Like a standard Linux shell, it allows you to interact with the device by executing commands from the shell. The shell can be accessed via ADB (Android Debug Bridge) command tool. The main purposes of the ADB on Android-powered devices are debugging, helping to develop applications and also, in some cases, it is used for synchronization purposes (when syncing HTC Wildfire, it is required to turn on the USB Debugging). We will use the ADB tool for uploading and executing the exploit, working with rooted device via super user shell with full access to whole device file system, programs and services.

ADB includes three components:

  1. A client, which runs on your machine. Windows users can invoke it from the cmd and Linux users - from the shell;
  2. A server, which runs as a background process on your machine. It manages communication between the client and the daemon running on the Android-powered device;
  3. A daemon, which runs as a background process on the device.

Full article: Android Rooting Using ADB

collect
0
avatar
Dennis Turpitka
guide
Zupyak is the world’s largest content marketing community, with over 400 000 members and 3 million articles. Explore and get your content discovered.
Read more