Is Rooting An Android Smartphone Dangerous?

Easily root Android phone by installing a program

A blogger has publicized what he says is a “one-click” method for rooting an Android phone, including instructions and files necessary to do so. The author of RyeBrye.com has credited someone using the alias Zinx for a process to root a phone by installing an .apk file on an Android phone that roots the device without requiring additional steps.

The process is much simpler than previous rooting efforts: Install the flashrec.apk, click on Flash Cyanogen Recovery 1.4, and power off/on your phone to ensure that it worked. Just like that, you’ve got a rooted phone.

The danger of rooting a phone has previously been that novice users risked making a mistake that would permanently damage the phone. This decreases the chance of that happening, but Rye says that this process is STILL dangerous and makes no guarantee about whether or not your phone can be damaged.

RyeBrye is hosting the files and explaining the set-up process for a limited time. Read it thoroughly and make sure you know what you’re doing before attempting to root your phone.

[RyeBrye.com]

Known issues:

• If your phone doesn’t work with cyanogen 1.4’s image (which I believe are 32A based HTC Dreams) you should probably not use this. If recovery fails to boot, you should be able to pull the battery and reboot into the normal phone and then open the recovery flasher app again and “restore” your backed up recovery.img – but no promises… This is all done at your own risk.
• The exploit used (CVE-2009-2692) in this hack is already patched. The kernel was patched upstream on August 11th, so it is likely that an update will be pushed out from T-mobile VERY quickly to help prevent malicious people from using this same exploit.
• Apologies in advance to anyone who has to work quickly and work hard to patch this exploit in the wild. (Although it should be noted that if you just shipped phones that weren’t neutered in the first place, it would save us all a lot of work and help us all be on the same team… but that’s a topic for another post.)

Original links:

If my blog goes down, these links are the original source for the files:

http://zenthought.org/content/project/flashrec

Mirrors:

http://g1files.webs.com/Zinx/android-root-20090816.tar.gz
http://g1files.webs.com/Zinx/flashrec-20090815.apk
http://g1files.webs.com/Zinx/flashrec-20090815.tar.gz

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