HACKING THE MOTOROLA A780

The Motorola A780 is a Linux based quad-band GSM phone. Kernel hacker Harald Welte has chosen up one of these phones as well as started poking around in the system. The very first thing of note is that the phone doesn’t utilize the typical lightweight tools discovered in most embedded systems. instead of busybox or uClibc it utilizes their heavier counterparts. The phone likewise has a 2.4 kernel as well as changing to the 2.6 kernel is a long term goal. Harald has effectively developed a compatible toolchain as well as has netfilter/iptables running on the A780. It should be possible to build a firewall between the GPRS as well as the USB connection. other hackers are working on adding the stock Linux bluetooth codebase; this may be one of the very first phones supporting A2DP stereo headsets. The future looks bright for hackers with new exploitable features emerging daily like JTAG pads for both processors as well as debugging callbacks developed into the factory code. Harald Welte will be providing these as well as future discoveries at the 22nd Chaos communication Congress in December.

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