The Android experience III

Let me sum up, what already happened until now:

1. The device is rooted
2. the following apps are installed:
• SuperUser
• Android Terminal Emulator
3. some apps installed by the operator (t-com) have been uninstalled
4. the device was not personalized at all, nor was a SIM inserted
5. in order to use the market, I’ve set up a WiFi network

I’ve set up a ssh-server, to speed up the work in the console. To get more precise, I’ve installed dropbear, which is shipped with SSHDroid.

SSHDroid contains more or less two main components:

1. SSHDroid
   A GUI, which seems to check if AdFree is installed.
   Ok, the main task is to configure dropbear. You have to set the admin password, the port, authentication type etc.
2. dropbear
   the OpenSource ssh daemon. The daemon is configured through SSHDroid.

SSHDroid checks during its startup whether an AdFree app is installed, and denies the proper execution of the main app, but dropbear is fired. A short

# busybox netstat -at

shows that dropbear listens on port 22. Hacking

$ ssh root@<ip>

into the console will connect to your phone. The ip leased to the phone can be obtained by writing

# busybox ifconfig

on the Android phones’ terminal.

Dropbear says hello and tells us (the not configured) password of the root user. Due to the lack of functionality of SSHDroid a proper termination of SSHDroid and dropbear is inevitable. Typing

# ps aux

into the terminal to obtain the PID of the running processes and

# kill -s 9 #####

to kill the specified process, where #### is the PID of the process. This should be repeated until all processes of SSHDroid and dropbear are terminated. Unfortunately the 551 does not offer any special keys on the slider keyboard, on other phones you can use the “`”:

# kill -s 9 `pidof dropbear`

Pidof returns the PID of the given processname, and kill kills the specific process. Note the ““”, which are a subcommand on the most *nix shells, the result of the subcommand is passed to the “parent”.

Some of you might ask, why ssh. The answer is quite simple: 3,2″. The display is huge enough for the most activities, but if you hack your phone, a little bigger display seems to be a good idea. Furthermore the lack of special keys like “`” is very hard.

Part 4 of the Android experience deals with app permissions.