Android/Root
Android Rooting
The purpose of this project is to develop a framework for rooting android devices using free/libre and open source software.
A majority of android devices are locked down and therefore cannot be updated with community-supported patches and upgrades.
All major/well-known rooting apps are proprietary and therefore cannot be entirely trusted.
Introduction
This email thread excerpt has been modified for brevity.
rage: One thing has been troubling me about Android development. Installing a custom recovery or rom is possible using fastboot. However, there seems to be no open source application for gaining root access on a device.
0sm0sis: As for rooting/bootloader unlocking using vulnerabilities, that's a whole other game. You basically need an escalation vulnerability to get a root prompt and then, if possible, unlock the bootloader from there, and that's why they generally remain closed-source, since they don't want to disclose their vulnerabilities and risk the OEM patching them before they can spread it.
heroxbd: Yeah, that is an unfortunate status quo.
rage: Hmm, so I get what you're saying about the vulnerabilities, but using a proprietary utility to achieve root access, for the purpose of liberating my device from proprietary software seems a bit backwards to me.
rage: A big problem that I have is that the more popular devices usually have many utilities, while less popular ones don't have anything at all. If there were a framework that could fetch exploits for a given device then it would be trivial to add new devices to the tool.
rage: Maybe we could write one as part of our toolchain?
heroxbd: That would be very useful. Please go ahead.