You may have heard about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S3, it is going to attract a lot of peoples attention, including hackers, rom developers and many many Android fanatics. Lots of these people are going to be looking to root their new phones and set them free.
Well a short while ago XDA Elite Recognized Developer Chainfire posted something on the XDA Developers website that will be of interest to many people. Here is what he posted.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have root on the SGS3 (!)
This will all be common knowledge in the near future, but here’s some info I though various devs, chefs, and users will be dying to know!
Unfortunately, I am not able to share the “insecure” kernel with you at the moment, because of fears it is traceable to the leaker (this is said to be the last traceable firmware revision).
This root is, as expected, trivial. It was a simple matter of repacking the stock kernel, with a modified adbd binary that thinks ro.secure=0 (even if ro.secure=1). This gives access to all adb root commands (see screenshots). Then SuperSU was installed manually.
Kernel
The modification was trivial, because this time around, Samsung is using the standard boot.img format, instead of the zImage format used for SGS1, SGS2, SGNote, etc, that is much harder to repackage.
This is also why I don’t feel particularly bad about not giving you the insecure kernel – any serious dev on this board can do the same thing in 10 minutes.
Recovery
The recovery partition is also being used this time around. And thus we can flash recoveries separately from the kernel.
Bootloaders
There was no warning triangle at boot-up after flashing the modified kernel, but download mode did show a custom kernel flash counter which increased. Whether or not flashing a custom recovery also triggers this counter is as of yet unknown.
Final note
This was all tested on a current (release candidate) SGS3 firmware. There may be a newer firmware on true retail/production devices. Though some things may change, it is unlikely to change much. Let’s hope nothing
Also, Triangle Away did not work. They have hidden the boot partitions again as on the latest SGNote firmwares.
(No, I don’t have an SGS3 yet, everything was done remotely)
So what does this all mean for the average user. Not a lot but for the many power users who want the most from their new phones, this means an awful lot.
If all goes to plan shortly after public release you will be able root your device (voiding the warranty) and then overclock it, underclock it, change fonts, change boot animation, theme it or install custom roms. If you want to read more about this head over to the link below.
Source – XDA
About James Pearce
I spend most of the day telling people to turn stuff off and back on again. Inbetween doing that I post news and reviews over here.
I am about to embark on a Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT self imposed restriction for a few months. Keep your eyes on the site for updates.
