Updated 07/16 to include Motorola’s statement.
Many Android fans are lining up to get Motorola’s latest phone, the Droid X, which hit retail shelves Thursday morning. But the phone has raised the hackles of some Android geeks.
Motorola has reportedly made it difficult for hackers to mod the Droid X by using a bootloader and chip combination that could potentially brick the phone if it is broken. But contrary to speculation by some hackers, the phone won’t “self-destruct” or “brick” if it is hacked, says Motorola. The bootloader is the software component that loads the operating system in a gadget.
Android hackers say Motorola’s move has made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to load custom versions of Android on the Droid X.
“Motorola wants to keep people from modding their devices,” says Ryan Mills, an Android modder and blogger. “I don’t know if they are just afraid for security purposes, or they just want to stay proprietary.”
However, not everyone agrees that the Droid X will be un-hackable — and it’s impossible to confirm at this point, because almost no one has yet attempted the mod.
“The Droid X and a majority of Android consumer devices on the market today have a secured bootloader,” a Motorola spokeswoman confirmed to Wired.com.
“Motorola’s primary focus is the security of our end users and protection of their data, while also meeting carrier, partner and legal requirements,” says the spokeswoman. Verizon declined to comment.
The questions around the ability to hack the Droid X have stirred up a debate about how much a handset maker can control Android, which otherwise touts itself as an open source operating system. Android’s ability to be hacked and modded is one of the major draws of the OS.
Handset makers and wireless carriers decide which operating system can run on a phone and customers usually have no choice in the matter. In the case of Android, hackers have created their own versions of the read-only memory, or ROM, on their cellphones, which holds the firmware. These custom ROMs can be loaded on an Android device to unlock features in a process known as “flashing.” That means devices that run the custom ROMs can boast features that the handset manufacturer or carrier may not have otherwise included. DIYers have gone so far as to buy phones running Windows Mobile OS and replace it with Android.
In case of the Droid X, the phone’s processor includes a feature invented by IBM called eFuse. IBM’s eFuse, which is baked into the chips, gives manufacturers the ability to make changes to information on a chip that would otherwise be “hard coded.” It also helps manage power and memory in the device.
Commenter p3Droid on the MyDroidWorld forum speculates that the eFuse technology looks for information from the bootloader associated with the device. If it doesn’t get that, the eFuse trips the boot up process, leading to a potential bricking of the phone.
“The bootloader in the Droid X is signed with the recovery and the kernel for the device,” explains Steven Bird, who has created custom ROMs for other devices. ” If those don’t correspond it won’t work. It’s not any sort of self-destruct in there.”
Rumors about eFuse’s self-destruct mode are greatly exaggerated, says the Motorola spokeswoman.
“The technology is not loaded with the purpose of preventing a consumer device from functioning, but rather ensuring for the user that the device only runs on updated and tested versions of software,” she says. “If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed. Checking for a valid software configuration is a common practice within the industry to protect the user against potential malicious software threats.”
The Droid X is not the only Motorola phone to have this technology, he says. Bird says that many of Motorola’s phones including the Droid, Droid X and Milestone all have chips that integrate the eFuse technology.
“HTC has a similar technology with the Incredible that made it very difficult to write custom ROMs for it,” says Bird. “It just means it takes longer to mod the device.”
But at this point, almost all of this talk around the Droid X is “conjecture,” says Steve Kondik, aka Cyanogen, an Android hacker who runs the highly popular Cyanogen Mod community.
“From what I have gathered, no one has really tested anything to see if it is true,” he says. “One person who has tried to modify the bootloader says the system broke but we know nothing about how the mod was done and if it was done right.”
Kondik says the first step will be to root — the Android equivalent of jailbreaking — the device. From there, building custom ROMs for the Droid X may be difficult but it can be done, he says.
But it may not be enough to soothe modders like Mills. Mills and a few other Android developers are questioning if Motorola should be part of Android’s Open Handset Alliance if it doesn’t really want its phones to be toyed with.
Photo: Stefan Armijo/Wired.com
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