Jay Freeman, a well-known Android and iOS developer tested a known exploit for Android on Glass yesterday and announced his success on Twitter Friday afternoon. He stated that the “root” access grants users with full control of Android operating system.
“You take a backup from the device, modify the backup, and then restore the modified backup to the device. While the backup is restoring, you make a change to the data being restored that redirects the data being restored to overwrite a critical configuration file. This makes the device think that it is not running on real hardware: you make it think it is instead running on the emulator used by Android developers to test their software on desktop/laptop computers. As the emulator is designed for developers, it has full control and gives you “root”, said Freeman.
Another developer Liam McLoughlin also achieved root access to Glass the day before. As a result of his exploitation of the vulnerability, the researcher discovered a «debug mode» allowing him to access the ADB and «reboot-loader», which provided root-access to the device via the «fastboot OEM unlock».
