Jailbreaking the Google Android G1 Phone

Davey Winder
Friday, 07 November 2008 15:57

Your IT - Mobility

The T-Mobile G1 has been jailbroken, or at least root has been obtained in a few simple steps to provide full read and write system access to the device. It's easier than you might imagine.

Back in August when Google released the Android 0.9 SDK Beta it posted an open letter to the security community inviting them to Hack the Android.  Now it looks like someone has taken them up on their offer and done just that!

Just as Apple has discovered, when you lock down such a device there are plenty of people willing and able to unlock it through whatever means necessary. Indeed, when it released the iPhone 2.1 firmware in September it took precisely one day for the iPhone Dev Team to 'pwn' it.

T-Mobile must have been hoping for something different when it comes to the much hyped G1, the first Android powered Google Phone to hit the market. Especially as, in the USA for example, it is being sold locked down with a two year contract.

But no, the inevitable has happened and the G1 has been pwned. What's more, according to people at the XDA-Developers Forum responsible, it would appear to be a very easy thing to do.

Jailbreaking the Android is as simple as starting a telnet session. Someone stumbled across this after downloading the PTerminal software from the Android Market and realising that you can then start telnet on the G1 and telnet to it from your PC to log in as root.

In fact, it is so easy you can sum the process up in five steps:

1. Enable G1 WiFi to provide a handset IP address
2. Restart the G1
3. Start up PTerminal
4. Type 'cd system' and enter, type 'cd bin' and enter, type 'telnetd' and enter, type 'netstat' and enter to display the GI IP
5. Use this IP to telnet to the G1 where you will now be logged in as root

Then all you need to do in order to enable full read/write access to the Android system is type 'mount - oremount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system' from your terminal command prompt and bingo, the system file is remounted.

Expect things to get a lot easier, in the same way as jailbreaking the iPhone has, real soon now. Also expect a patch from Google to close the pwning loophole even quicker, and remember that you try any of this stuff at your own peril and could end up with an Android Brick!