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FTA: "A Malicious Root Kit" This article is nothing but hyperbole. First: there is no root kit. Second: "Malicious" implies that some damage is being done to y
by teilo 16y ago
FTA: "A Malicious Root Kit"
This article is nothing but hyperbole. First: there is no root kit. Second: "Malicious" implies that some damage is being done to your phone or your data.
FTA: "the new Google Android hardware rootkit acts just like a virus -- overriding user’s preferences to change settings and software to conform to the desires of a third party."
A virus, by definition, exploits your hardware and spreads from machine to machine. By any definition, this is not a virus.
Here's what's actually happening: The new HTC hardware has a copy of the system partition locked away in its iNAND chip, in an area that, as far as anyone as able to determine, is inaccessible by the running kernel, the bootloader, or recovery. If any changes are made to the System partition, at boot, the hardware re-flashes the system partition with the backup.
Yes, this means that you can't flash custom firmware on this phone - yet. But that's ALL it means.
- radley 16y agoDoesn't this also mean you can't do regular system updates, since the chip would replace it with the old system?
- teilo 16y agoI would presume that there is some sort of new method for OTAs on this phone, that overwrites the hidden portion of the iNAND. However, whether that method can be exploited to permanently root the phone remains to be seen. At present, no one knows how it works.
- peregrine 16y agoIts likely someone will find a work around for this, probably reverse engineered from the OTA updates. Cyanogen and his team are pretty resourceful folks.
- mycroftiv 16y agoFor some users that behavior meets our definition of "malicious". This design certainly seems to be motivated by malice directed at users who jailbreak their phones.