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Motorola's Sholes Bootloader Unlocked
teh31337one writes "Motorola's locked bootloader for their Sholes-family devices (Droid OG, Milestone, DroidX, Droid 2 etc, not Atrix 4G) has finally been cracked. @nenolod explains on his website: The Motorola Sholes platform uses a trusted bootloader environment. Signatures are stored as part of the CDT stored on the NAND flash. mbmloader verifies the signature on mbm before passing control. mbm verifies all other signatures before allowing the device to boot. There is a vulnerability in the way that Motorola generated the signatures on the sections stored in the CDT. This vulnerability is very simple. Like on the PlayStation 3, Motorola forgot to add a random value to the signature in order to mask the private key. This allowed the private key and initialization vector to be cracked. This comes at the time when HTC are also stepping up their attempts at locking down their phones . The recently released LTE flagship — ThunderBolt is their most locked-down phone to date ... They made signed images, a signed kernel, and a signed recovery. They also locked the memory."
"Terrorism," "piracy," and "think of the children" are excuses that the average person just seems to accept.
"There was a terrorist attack!? Maybe you should take away some of our rights that we claim we are better for having so that we can have a false sense of security! That couldn't ever be abused by a corrupt government! Humans can't ever make mistakes when they are given unchecked powers!"
"Oh, you implemented this strict and annoying DRM scheme because of pirates? It's all their fault even though you're the one who implemented it and it's completely ineffective against them! Take all of the features in your product away to 'battle' hypothetical pirates!"
"A child could get hurt, but probably won't!? You better ban that product/practice immediately! Banning something to 'save' an extremely small portion of the population is a completely intelligent decision!"
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!