Overview

Android devices do not allow their owners to have the root privilege on the device. This is fine for normal customers, but for users who want to make deep customizations on their devices, this is too restrictive. There are ways to overcome these restrictions, most of which require the root privilege on the device. The process of gaining the root device on Android devices is called rooting. Being able to root Android devices is a very useful skill for security experts.

The objective of this lab is two-fold. First, through this lab, students will get familiar with the process of device rooting and understand why certain steps are needed. Many people can root Android devices, but not many people fully understand why things have to be done in a particular way. Second, the entire rooting mechanism involves many pieces of knowledge about the Android system and operating system in general, so it serves as a great vehicle for students to gain such in-depth system knowledge. In this lab, we will ask students to develop a complete rooting package from scratch, and demonstrate how to use the package to root the Android VM provided by us.

Tasks (PDF)

• VM version: This lab has been tested on our pre-built SEEDUbuntu-16.04 VM
• Note:: This lab needs to use the SEEDUbuntu-16.04 VM and the Android7.1 VMs (can be downloaded from here)

Time (Suggested)

• Supervised (closely-guided lab session): 2 hours
• Unsupervised (take-home project): 1 week

Files Needed

• SimpleSU.zip

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