Sunday, January 26, 2014

Turning a Kindle Fire 2 into a Hacking Tablet

Tablets are getting cheaper, and I just bought a Kindle Fire 2 for $67 refurbished.  I really bought it to mess around with, and will probably end up using it in my car for a tablet/radio.

In the meantime, I wanted to see if I could root it, run a real version of android (instead of amazon's version) and load it up with hacking tools.

Here is what I did:

Step 1.

Get Root - This was a bit tricky.  You need the adb tool for the android SDK, but it is included in some of the scripts and downloads.  The XDA forums got me pointed in the right direction, but what eventually 'got root' was a directory traversal vulnerability.

This post helped a lot. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2075959

But this is how I finally got root.  http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Jun/115

After getting root, the tablet was very unstable.  I had to run some commands based on the scripts from the XDA thread linked above, and it eventually was stable.

Step 2

Brick the Device - Not on purpose, but I did.  I tried to take a shortcut.  My version of the Kindle Fire requires a second bootloader, and I tried to install it using an apk file.  I had to buy a fastboot cable and write a new (actually older) boot image to get the tablet running again.  I also wrote the second bootloader to the kindle at that time.  http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2304584

Step 3

From that point on it was pretty easy.  The second bootloader adds some options, so I just had to flash the correct image.  I used cyanogenmod.  http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_otter

Step 4

After that, it is just a matter of using the Linux Deploy app to install Kali to a chroot.  http://www.kali.org/how-to/kali-linux-android-linux-deploy/

Thanks to all the folks in the above links for helping make my cheap tablet something pretty cool.


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