Rooting android device
Atluri Balachandar
Senior Android Developer @ Bureau | Kotlin, Android, React Native, Flutter
Have you ever wondered if we can peek into the data stored by that app you use regularly ?. Or if you can change your android device model and manufacturer name to fool different apps? While you can't do it directly in your android device, You can do it if you follow certain steps to unlock your device. This process is called Rooting the android device.
Rooting allows us to change both static and dynamic runtime behaviour of the mobile. While the steps to root each device model differs slightly, process can be broken into 3 steps :
Magisk is an open source app developed to root any Android device. It's actively maintained by a team of which you can have regular updates of Magisk app through this telegram channel https://t.me/magisk_app.
It used to be very easy to root earlier android versions. These days, manufacturers have made it a bit difficult to root owing to the different kind of abuses that can happen without the knowledge of mobile owner. Anyhow, people have been trying to find a way to detect rooting in their apps to avoid people tampering with them. There's one popular open source library https://github.com/scottyab/rootbeer that's being currently used extensively for this purpose. There's also google's Safety net attestation api or Play integrity api for this purpose. But people have found different ways to bypass all these checks. In fact, Magisk team itself added different features to the Magisk app to bypass these checks easily. They have even made a module named Shamiko to bypass these checks.
Detection of rooting is one of the difficult problems I have been trying to solve. While I understand there's no foolproof solution for this, I believe we can make the detection very much better than how it is currently done. This is going to be a perpetual challenge to all the Android enthusiasts out there bettering their model each time a loop hole is found by the Magisk team or others.