v3l0c1r4pt0r.tk

Recently I was asked to configure internet browser on a thing called Vasco Translator Premium 7″. The device looks exactly like many of the low-end Android tablets from China. And it happens to be one. The problem is that is was locked to used the only allowed application which is the translator. It has some minor functions like camera and it seems that was a mistake of its authors. They used default Android app as Camera and Gallery applications (and forgot to lock send message button in the latter 🙂 ).

At first I have to highlight the fact, this is not the full unlock or root of the device, but the fact of ease of the process allows me to suppose that rooting the thing should not be too difficult, too. Our goal here is to open up the web browser. Because as it seems the software below the shitty overlay is ordinary Android with all the apps on its place. And how useful might be the tablet without internet browser?

Prerequisites

The tool we will use to do the trick is good ol’ WAP Push protocol. For some reason in newer Android devices this dinosaur has been revived and supported out of the box. The goal is to send such message to our locked device, and since the gallery app mentioned above allows to escape to Messaging app, read it on it. This is probably the hardest part of the process. And possibly may require to buy some additional hardware (if you have access to any service, you know is sending WAP Push, you can use it and skip this part).

And that hardware is a GSM modem. It is highly possible that you already have one that can be used. The thing we will need is the possibility to send SMS through AT commands. Many Android phones allows that, at least if they are rooted, probably LTE/3G modems can do that too (not checked that personally). Ok, since the procedure to get access to AT interface is completely different for any device you can get, I have to leave you alone with getting used to that. After some time, you will probably end up in minicom or some similar program and parameters like 115200/8N1 or 9600/8N1. In my case (Android with Qualcomm processor) it is /dev/smd11 and params are 115200/8N1. Now you could type AT to check if the device you found is really an AT modem (should respond with OK) and AT+SCA? to check your SMS center address. You should be able to recognize it or Google it to check if it really belongs to your mobile operator.

Crafting SMS

Now, since we have all the tools, we can start crafting SMS. I will omit many details here since just general description of PDU format would take whole article and complete one is more than 100 pages long. The only part you need to know about is destination address. This will be the phone number of your device. Trailer of the message is WAP Push payload, which to be described will need another 100 or so pages, so skip it. As a remark, there is some program called wbxml2xml/xml2wbxml that allows to read/write the message. In our case, we want to enforce the device to visit Google.com, so this will be the address of WAP bookmark.

Ok, so on the picture above, thing we are interested in are [dest_addr] and [dest_len]. The first encodes telephone number “+37201234567” (note lack of ‘+’ sign), the second its length (as number of digits, 0x0b == 11). The number of your device should be placed here and you could move on to next section.

Or you can try customizing the payload. The important thing here is marked as [WBXML] and can be crafted with program mentioned before. After changing this, adjustment of [ud_len] value to number of bytes in payload (those after the length) is required.

Sending SMS

Since we already have modem, we need to type AT command to initiate message sending. But before that, we need to ensure that we are in binary mode. Type AT+CMGF? and, if value is other than zero, AT+CMGF=0. Now start sending with:

AT+CMGS=55

Where 55 is length of payload in bytes, but without SMSC header (one byte at the beginning). Modem should respond with > prompt, where SMS could be typed.

0041000b917302214365f700042a0605040b8423f0ea0601ae03056a0045c60c03676f6f676c652e636f6d00080103476f6f676c65000101

And after that press CTRL-Z (^Z) in your terminal. This should send SUB (substitute) to modem. It is important not to use any characters in between, like spaces and ENTER. After about a second, you should see that sending was successful and no error was returned.

Receiving and opening

Now, if you have your translator turned on, you should hear that new message was received, but nothing appeared on screen. That is ok. The rest of the procedure is shown on video below:

Postscriptum

After another few minutes of playing with the device I found another method of opening the browser and it is way faster than what was described below. But the first one was much more entertaining for me and is showing one of the many places where serious bugs could be found – forgotten technologies, still being implemented, possibly used, but with lack of knowledge about details in general public.

You can see the other method on video below, and possibly it is the one you want to use.

wget dependency tree

Lately I have tried to download some file from a website to my Android smartphone. Simple thing, yeah? Well, not really. Unfortunately mobile browser developers removed many features from their mobile distributions. One of them is a possibility of downloading random page to disk as is. Instead (this is the case at least with Mozilla’s product) they are forcing “Download as PDF” feature. I had a bit of luck, because the file I was trying to download was MP4 movie, which is downloadable, maybe not in an intuitive way, but it is. But before I have found that feature hidden in a player’s context menu, I tried another solution – wget. Since I am great fan of terminals, I have busybox installed on my phone. Those of you, who know what exactly is busybox should know that this is set of lightweight variants of most standard UNIX tools. So, if they are lightweight, they had to cut some part of tool functionality, right? And in case of my busybox’s wget, they cut HTTPS support. And today, it is more likely to encounter site which is only HTTPS than one that is only HTTP, at least when talking about popular sites. So I had to get my own distribution of wget, that will not be such constrained one.

Not to get you bored too much, here you can find binary distribution of what I achieved to compile. It was compiled for ARMv7 platform using NDKr12b and API level 24 (Nougat), so it will probably not work on most of current Android phones, but if you read later, it is probably working on your device or even is outdated. If you are interested in recompiling binaries yourself, you can find detailed how-to in the next part of this article.

Dependencies

Before compiling wget itself, you have to have whole bunch of its dependencies. But at first, you of course need Android compiler. It is distributed as part of NDK and I won’t describe its installation here. Sources of every program compiled here can be grabbed from its official sites (list at the end of this post). The only exception is libtasn1, which required few hacks to be done to make it compile with Android bionic libc. Its source, ported to Android can be get from my github repo.

Let’s start with programs that does not depend on anything. For all projects, the procedure is more or less the same and can be described with simplified bash script:

tar -zxvf program-1.00.tar.gz
mkdir build
mkdir install
cd build
CC=arm-linux-androideabi-gcc AR=arm-linux-androideabi-ar RANLIB=arm-linux-androideabi-ranlib CFLAGS=-pie \
    ../program-1.00/configure --host=arm-linux --prefix=/data/local/root
make
make install DESTDIR=$(dirname `pwd`)/install/
cd ../install
tar -zcvf program.tar.gz *

gmp, libidn and libffi

For these three programs, the procedure above should work without any modification.

nettle

Since nettle depends on gmp, it has to be configured with paths to gmp binaries and headers in its CFLAGS and LDFLAGS variables. They should look like this:

CFLAGS="-pie -I`pwd`/../../gmp/install/data/local/root/include"
LDFLAGS="-L`pwd`/../../gmp/install/data/local/root/lib"

when invoking configure script.

libtasn1

This was the hardest part for me, but should go smoothly now. Script below should do the work correctly:

git clone git@github.com:v3l0c1r4pt0r/android_external_libtasn1.git
mkdir build
mkdir install
cd build
CC=arm-linux-androideabi-gcc AR=arm-linux-androideabi-ar RANLIB=arm-linux-androideabi-ranlib CFLAGS=-pie \
    ../libtasn1/configure --host=arm-linux --prefix=/data/local/root --disable-doc
make
make install DESTDIR=$(dirname `pwd`)/install/
cd ../install
tar -zcvf libtasn1.tar.gz

p11-kit

This is the last dependency of gnutls which is the only, but very important dependency of wget. Just embedding libtasn1 and libffi should do the job well.

CFLAGS="-pie -I`pwd`/../../libtasn1/install/data/local/root/include"
LDFLAGS="-L`pwd`/../../libtasn1/install/data/local/root/lib -L`pwd`/../../libffi/install/data/local/root/lib"

Notice that libffi has no headers, so we add it just to CFLAGS here!

gnutls

This one was more complicated than the rest. As I mentioned above, it is very important to wget functionality. However wget’s dependency on it could probably be turned off, we would not have TLS support then. When compiling it I had some problems that seemed to be serious. There were a few errors while making it, so I had to call make twice and even though it failed. Despite that it seem to work after make install, which obviously failed too. In my case following script did the job:

mkdir build
mkdir install
cd build
CC=arm-linux-androideabi-gcc AR=arm-linux-androideabi-ar RANLIB=arm-linux-androideabi-ranlib \
    CFLAGS="-pie -I`pwd`/../../gmp/install/data/local/root/include -I`pwd`/../../nettle/install/data/local/root/include -I`pwd`/../../libtasn1/install/data/local/root/include -I`pwd`/../../libidn/install/data/local/root/include -I`pwd`/../../p11-kit/install/data/local/root/include" \
    LDFLAGS="-L`pwd`/../../gmp/install/data/local/root/lib -L`pwd`/../../nettle/install/data/local/root/lib -L`pwd`/../../libtasn1/install/data/local/root/lib -L`pwd`/../../libidn/install/data/local/root/lib -L`pwd`/../../p11-kit/install/data/local/root/lib" \
    ../gnutls-3.4.9/configure --host=arm-linux --prefix=/data/local/root --disable-cxx --disable-tools
make || make
make install DESTDIR=$(dirname `pwd`)/install/ || true
cd ../install
tar -zcvf file.tar.gz *

Compilation

Since we should now have all dependencies compiled, we can try compiling wget itself. The procedure here is the same as with dependencies. We just have to pass path to gnutls. And then standard configure, make, make install should work. However if your NDK installation is fairly new and you were not hacking it before, you most likely don’t have <sys/fcntl.h> header and make should complain about that. Luckily Android itself have this header present, but for reason unknown it is kept in include directory directly. To make wget, and any other program that uses it, compile you can just point “sys/” instance to <fcntl.h> with symlink or do something like that:

echo "#include <fcntl.h>" > $TOOLCHAIN/sysroot/usr/include/sys/fcntl.h

where $TOOLCHAIN/sysroot is path at which you have your headers placed. Depending on tutorial you were using for making it work it may have different structure.

Installation

All commands I presented above implies that you have your custom-compiled binaries in “/data/local/root”. I made it that way to have clear separation between default and busybox binaries. If you want to have them somewhere else, you should pass it to configure scripts of all programs you are compiling. After successful compilation of all tools, I have made single tarball containing all compilation output (this file’s link was placed above). Its content can be installed into Android by typing

tar -zxvf wget-with-deps.tar.gz -C/

using adb shell or terminal emulator.

Sources

Below you can find links to sources of all programs nedded to follow this tutorial.

• wget
• gnutls
• gmp
• nettle
• libtasn1
• libidn
• p11-kit
• libffi