Comments on: Android Root Access Gained Through PTerminal Application

By: wensterretje

wensterretje — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:58:39 +0000

Werk niet root G1 !!! Ik krijg telnetd permission denied .

By: Alan

Alan — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:01:11 +0000

Hi everyone,

I’ve compiled a set of instructions of rooting which actually worked for me. I hope this helps someone:

http://ww2.cs.fsu.edu/~lupsha/android/

Alan

By: Roy

Roy — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 22:29:42 +0000

iv got n connection refused msg from telnet..
what should i do?

By: Zach

Zach — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:07:44 +0000

I’m such a n00b I don’t understand all this shit I just know that I need “root access” to use the screenshot app I downloaded in the market.

it shouldn’t be THIS difficult to do it (like I said, I’m a little inept at this), why couldn’t they just install it on the phone?!

By: Fnord

Fnord — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:13:30 +0000

Okay, apparently it still works if you enter ‘telnetd’ 2 or 3 times really fast as suggested elsewhere. Time to backdoor this thing!

Also, there is an alternate means of getting root that doesn’t require wifi.
Step 1: Have a server or shell account that allows tunneling.
Step 2: Download ConnectBot, ssh into step 1.
Step 3: Make a Remote tunnel, remote port anything (like 12345), local: localhost:25
Step 4: Spam telnetd really fast as stated above.
Step 5: Login to shell account and telnet localhost 12345
Step 6: Enjoy your root.

By: Fnord

Fnord — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:53:08 +0000

As of 8am cst telnetd stops running on mine, and busybox’s telnetd will not run either. pTerminal doesn’t show any errors, but when trying a different port, ‘busybox telnet 127.0.0.1 5555′ errored with ’socket: permission denied’.

Oddly, while I did install today’s OTA update, I was able to use the telnetd trick for a few hours before this happened. I think a stealth update removed pTerminal’s networking privs.

Should’ve installed an sdcard backdoor instead of messing with an arm cross compiler for dropbear =[

By: SplasPood

SplasPood — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:15:25 +0000

When I first found telnetd and discovered what user it ran as I tried connecting to my phone’s ip over 3g…. alas it seems very filtered

I posted this to xda originally hoping others will find cool uses for it, at least while it lasts. can’t wait!

By: nick

nick — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:58:25 +0000

fun tidbit… you can use it to restart your phone with the ‘reboot’ command.

By: nick

nick — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:48:24 +0000

Wow, I’m sure this will be ‘corrected’ in the next update… to bad it can be very useful for exploring ones device. just if you turn on telnetd, make sure to turn it off before walking around in public

By: Kunjan

Kunjan — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:44:30 +0000

The loop hole is not in the Pterminal app. The problem is with telnetd running as root.

Each app in android has its own user. Telnetd is not a “standard” android aap. but a linux binary that runs outside of android ui.

telnetd is owned by root, and hence runs as root. but since there is no authentication for the root user, it works as expected.

I suspect it was left there for debugging, and probably used by the SDK also.