An Android enthusiast claims that he has found a method to gain root access on Motorola’s latest Droid X smartphone. Bird said that he had ported an exploit for the Motorola Milestone, which was recently released by developer Sebastian Krahmer.
The exploit helped him to cash in on Android drawback, which resembles a privilege escalation vulnerability, found by Krahmer in 2009. The developer briefly divulged how he hacked in a little message to Google's engineers. Krahmer explained the hack in a document which he now offers with the exploit code.
"For the Google Engineers: The vulnerability is inside init, perfectly porting old udev's CVE-2009-1185," he wrote. "Exploitation sounds easy therefore but only the experienced will recognize its beauty."
Bird said that users of Droid X must use the Android debugging tool to launch the exploit on their device. Step wise instructions on how to do it are available at AllDroid forum community. The exploit enables users to edit the contents of filesystem and run third-party software such as screenshot and tethering tools, which can only work on devices that are rooted.
Even though the handset can be rooted, the hackers haven’t yet cracked Droid X bootloader encryption. This means there’s still no chance of installation of custom ROM images on the handset. However, root access will certainly make the process of identifying and exploiting the weakness in the bootloader lock easier.
The development comes a week after the glitzy launch of Motorola’s Droid X. The reviews have started to come in with every expert judging the competitor of iPhone 4 on different logics and parameters. On an average, Droid X has managed a C+ rating. The much awaited handset soon became a rare commodity but still didn’t succeed in garnering the same hype as iPhone 4. In fact Apple’s antennagate row overshadowed Droid X debut. The entire week the web forums and media were abuzz with Antennagate conference and free bumper giveaway.
