Android Hack: Cracking WiFi Passwords With Your Phone

September 18, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 61 Comments

The WiFi adapter in your laptop has a special mode – monitor mode – that can be used to listen in on WiFi traffic and, with a little patience, can be used to crack a WEP password. Surprisingly, this monitor mode can’t be found on any Android device due in part to the limitations of the hardware. A group of three researchers, [Ruby], [Yuval], and [Omri], decided to spend their vacation adding monitor mode to their Android smartphones, allowing for a much more portable version of WiFi pwnage tools.

The phones used by the researchers – the Nexus One and Galaxy S II – used Broadcom chipsets that didn’t support monitor mode. To get around this limitation and allow the OS to see full 802.11 frames the team needed to reverse engineer the firmware of this Broadcom radio chip.

The team has released a firmware update for the bcm4329 and bcm4330 chipsets found in the Nexus One and Galaxy S II. The update may work for other phones with the same chipset, but don’t take our word on that.

There’s still a lot of work [Ruby], [Yuval], and [Omri] need to do. They’d like to add packet injection to their firmware hack, and of course create an APK to get this into the wild more easily.

If you have experience with kernel development and would like to help out, send the team an email. The source can be found at google code if you’d like to play around with it.

Video Preview: New IOIO Prototype

September 15, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

We got our hands on this prototype of the new IOIO design. It’s a breakout board that makes adding hardware to an Android device pretty easy. [Ytai Ben-Tsvi] sent it our way, and took a bit of time to explain some of the differences between this board and the original version. You can see our video preview embedded after the break.

The size and form factor of the board remain the same, but the choice and layout of parts has changed. Most obviously, the USB-A connector is gone, replaced by a USB ~~mini-B~~ micro-B connector. This makes it possible to use the board as a USB-on-the-go device, or as a USB host device with the help of an adapter that will ship with the board. The JST connector is for external power. The previous revision included a footprint for it but it was never populated. There has also been an upgrade to the voltage regulation circuit, using a newer part as the switch-mode regulator.

There was a last-minute bug discovered in the layout. [Ytai] wants iron-clad 5V to ground short protection and is re-spinning the board to ensure he achieves that goal. He can’t say for sure, but as we mentioned in our previous post about the prototype, a price cut is planned. It could cut the current price of $50 down to just $30, but that won’t be decided until all of the choices have been made for the first production run.

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IOIO Controller Replacement For An RC Truck

September 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This RC truck can be controlled with the tip of your thumb or the tilt of a wrist. That’s thanks to the IOIO which was inserted in place of the toy’s original controller. [Exanko] made the hardware changes in order to use his Android phone as the controller. The white circle is a software joystick that acts as throttle when your thumb moves along the Y axis, and steering when it moves along the X axis. But while he was at it he also included accelerometer input as an alternative control option.

The IOIO board has a Bluetooth dongle connected to its USB port as a means of wireless communication. The dongle was hacked to accept an external antenna, thereby increasing the truck’s range. There is also some on-board flair like LEDs for lights and even a laser diode for… well we’re not sure what that’s for. Get a better look at the hardware internals in the clip after the break.

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Giving The Nexus 7 HD Video Recording

September 11, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

As released, the Nexus 7 tablet includes a 1.2 Megapixel front-facing camera. Even though the camera supports taking pictures at a resolution of 1280 x 960, recording video is limited to a paltry 480p resolution. It turns out the inability to record HD 720p video isn’t a hardware limitation; engineers at either Google or Asus simply didn’t bother telling the Nexus 7 how to record in 720p.

[hillbeast] over on the XDA developers forum came up with a very easy fix for this problem that only involves a quick copy and paste job into the media_profiles.xml file.

After the break you can see two videos recorded with [thehillbeast]’s Nexus 7. The first is a 480p video of a bit of shrubbery and a fence, while the second video is the same scene recorded at 720p. A noticable difference in quality, and a neat hack to give the already awesome Nexus 7 some additional capabilities.

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Saving A Bricked Phone With A Pencil Lead

September 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

[stompyonos] bricked his Samsung Captivate. Not wanting to be without a phone for a while, he researched a fix online and found shorting a pair of pins on the USB port would put the phone into download mode, saving his phone. The only problem for this plan is [stompy] didn’t have any resistors on hand. Instead, he came up with a wonderful MacGyverism using a piece of paper, a bit of graphite, and a pair of paper clips.

The process of unbricking a Captivate requires a 300 or 330 kΩ resistor across pins 4 and 5 of the mini USB port. This can be done with a few resistors, but [stompy] only had a multimeter lying around. After scribbling a good bit of pencil lead on a piece of paper, he attached two paper clips to make a variable resistor, dialed it in to about 300 kΩ, and cut up an old Nokia charger for its USB plug.

Not bad for a very easy fix that didn’t cost [stompyonos] a dime, and certainly better than a $500 paperweight.

PlayStation Gaming On A NOOK Simple Touch

August 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Improvements in processing power really hit home when you see an eBook reader playing PlayStation games. Sure, we’re talking about a system which launched more than 15 years ago (the original PlayStation launched way back in 1995), but this is a $99 device which seems to be playing the games at full speed!

[Sean] wrote in to share the project with us. After rooting the device he installed System 7 (aka Mac OS 7) using Mini vMac for Android. He uses Free PlayStation Emulator (FPSE) to run the games. There is an Android version which provides the touch-screen controls you see above. We figured the graphics would be awful, but the video after the break proves us wrong. Other than being in black and white we think the graphics are fantastic. Just one hack was necessary to make this happen. [Sean] uses NoRefresh to keep the Nook from refreshing the screen which is what causes the film-negative type of flashing after several page turns.

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Adding Inductive Charging To An Android Tablet

August 16, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

This is a Gemei G9T, a 9.7″ Tablet running Android 4.0. [Carnivore] shows us how to modify it to use inductive charging. The inductive charging hardware is taken from a Palm device (this uses the Touchstone charging hardware seen in several other hacks). It’s easy to interface with the tablet’s electronics, but physically placing the coil and magnets is another story.

The video after the break gives you a full walk-through of the process. He starts by removing the screws and prying the case off of the tablet. From there [Carnivore] shows how to carefully remove the coil, circuit board, shielding, and magnets from a Palm back plate. The magnets are the first to be positioned on the tablet’s back plate. The metal is too thick for them to hold well so he uses a Dremel to grind away just enough material for a strong connection. Unfortunately the metal will shield the magnetic fields the coil needs to work so he cuts a hole in the case the same size as that coil. The area is covered in liquid electrical tape to prevent shorts, and everything is taped in place. Two jumper wires connected from the coil’s circuit board to the 5V charging input are all it takes to finish up the hack.

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