Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Mocor OS is a proprietary OS from UNISOC. This OS is used in various phone vendros such as Nokia, TCL and others.

During the initial boot up process, there is a user-lock password on the phone. Without knowledge of this, it should not be possible to access data on the phone.

The author found a weird (and not very well explained) loophole in the code. When a software reboot is triggered on the SoC via a crash, certain permission checks are not done compared to the regular boot.

By glitching the chip, this can be done. In fact, it does not require fancy equipment. Simply connect GND to the CLK for 50-100 ms during the password check and it will bypass the check.

This article was confusing to me. But, it seems that the soft reboot during the password prompt assumes that the system booted securely. So, it takes a shortcut if a soft reboot occurs after this point. To be honest, not sure if this is true but with the large timing window, this almost appears to be a software bug than a hardware bug.