Switching to Root without Root Password

Hello Linux geeks, today I would like to share one trick with you that will always help you out when you need root access but you don't have it's password. Here I am considering that you know basic stuffs about root, administrator and normal user access/permissions. To get root access you know at least the administrator password, because this is not a hacking it's a ethical trick. So just follow the following basic steps to gain root access.

XPrivacy - Xposed Framework Module

About XPrivacy

In  earlier post, I had explained about Xposed Installer and OpenPDroid. The former explaining about modifying your ROM without modifying an APK or flashing a custom ROM, and the latter explaining about protecting your privacy and providing fake or null information to the apps that access your private data.

Now, today I'm going to explain about a combination of both Xposed and OpenPDroid. Yeah, enter XPrivacy module for Xposed Framework.  Wondering what is it?

I am going to explain about it in a minute, read on..!!

XPrivacy can be used as an alternative to OpenPDroid, though not as restrictive as OpenPDroid can be, but still is a great option for those who cannot patch their ROM to run OpenPDroid. XPrivacy can be used to prevent applications from accessing your private sensitive data.

XPrivacy does this by providing an application with null or fake data.

XPrivacy does not block the permissions of an application, it just provides the application with fake data, hence there'll be no problem of a particular application getting force closed because of using XPrivacy.

If providing fake or null data to an application causes problems in working of an application, then the same can be reversed. By default, all newly-installed applications will not be allowed to access any data, so that any new application cannot leak any sensitive data after its installation. After every application installation, XPrivacy will prompt to ask for the data you want the application to have access to.

As the developer of the XPrivacy module says, XPrivacy will monitor attempts made by all applications to access sensitive data. XPrivacy will highlight (with a yellow triangle) a data category for an application (or an application name in the application browser) as soon as data of the data category has been used. XPrivacy will also display if an application has internet access, indicating that the application poses a risk of sharing the data it obtains with an external server. If an application has requested Android permissions to access data in a data category, it will also be displayed (with a green tick), but this will only be shown when looking at an individual application, since checking permissions for all applications is quite slow.

XPrivacy is built using the Xposed framework. XPrivacy taps into a number of selected functions of Android through the Xposed framework. Depending on the function, XPrivacy conditionally skips execution of the original function (for example when an application tries to set a proximity alert) or alters the result of the original function (for example to return empty calendar data).

Installation of XPrivacy

1.    Requires Android Jelly Bean (4.1 and above) and rooted phone.

2.    Requires Xposed Framework installed.

3.    Download XPrivacy and Xposed fix for your Android version from  here.

4.    Enable XPrivacy in Xposed Installer > Modules tab.

5.    Reboot into Recovery mode.

6.    Flash Xposed fix for the version of Android.

7.    Reboot your phone.

If you have any queries, feel free to comment.!!

OpenPDroid – Protect your Privacy in an Android Phone

Whenever we download an application from the Android Play Store, it shows us the permissions the applications uses. Many applications access our data like, location, usage statistics, contacts, messages, phone numbers. Even if we don't want to share a particular data with the application due to privacy concerns, the only way not to share data is to uninstall the application. We can also provide fake data to the application. But HOW?

         

OpenPDroid helps protect your privacy by providing real, fake, null or random data based on our preferences. We can configure OpenPDroid for each and every application installed on our device, so we can configure what data to share with various applications. For example, if we have set our preference as to provide location as 'Mumbai' for Facebook app, then even if we are in USA, Facebook will only get location as 'Mumbai'. Fascinating, isn't it?

PDroid Manager Application

         

         

Description of OpenPDroid from the developer:

“OpenPDroid is a set of modifications to the Android framework and libraries which allows fine-tuning of the data which applications are able to retrieve about your device, your account, your messages, and more.”

“OpenPDroid intervenes in API interactions by apps (e.g. when an app attempts to retrieve your location, phone number, or contacts) and provides real data, empty data, fake data or random data, depending on the user setting.”

As OpenPDroid just modifies the data requested by the app without modifying the permissions of the app, there is very less chance of getting undesired effects like Force Close of app, etc. OpenPDroid supports Android versions 4.1.2 and 4.2.1, and is also completely open-source.

Permissions of Google Chrome

         

This actually needs modification of Android framework and hence is hard to implement on a particular Android OS you already have, and is not as easy as installing an app. This mod should be added to Android ROM when the ROM is compiled from source. There also is a tool named auto-patcher for implementing the mod in an existing ROM. The tool is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

         

Though implementing OpenPDroid requires much effort, it is well worth, if you are concerned about your privacy from the big list of permissions required by various apps you use.

For more information, you can refer to: OpenPDroid

Move up Your Text SMS to Your Gmail Account

Backing up your text messages from your Android phone to your Gmail account is so simple there’s no reason to not back them up and make them search-friendly in the process. Read on to see how you can turn your Gmail account into an SMS vault.

Fig1: Gmail with Android

Prerequisites:

It’s easy to lose your text messages. Backing up your SMS messages to your Gmail account is so simple, however, there’s no good reason not to do it. For this tutorial you’ll need three things:

•  Your Android phone

•  A free copy of SMS Backup+

• A Gmail account

Configuring Your Gmail Account for IMAP Access: 

SMS Backup+ requires IMAP access to your Gmail account to function. Let’s take a moment and hop over to the Gmail account we’re planning on using with the application and check the status.

 

 Fig2: IMAP and POP label

Login to your Gmail account and navigate to Settings –> Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Check Enable IMAP. Scroll down and click Save Changes. That’s the only configuration you’ll need to do within your Gmail account.

Installing and Configuring SMS Backup+:

Fig3: Installing SMS Backup+

With our Gmail account IMAP features toggled on, it’s time to install SMS Backup+. Hit up the Google Play Store and download the app. After the application is installed, it’s time to get configuring. Launch the application. The first screen you’ll see will look like the following:

 

Fig4: Launch Screen

The first step is to set up the connection to your Gmail account. Tap Connect. The default browser on your Android phone will launch and you’ll be prompted to login to the Gmail account you want to use for backing up your messages. After you login you’ll need to authorize SMS Backup+ to utilize your Google account like so:

Fig5:Google Permission Screen

 The first step is to set up the connection to your Gmail account. Tap Connect. The default browser on your Android phone will launch and you’ll be prompted to login to the Gmail account you want to use for backing up your messages. After you login you’ll need to authorize SMS Backup+ to utilize your Google account like so:

Click Grant Access. You’ll be prompted to begin a backup immediately or skip the initial backup:

  Fig6:Backup option Screen 

Click Backup,we didn’t come all this way not to back things up! If you hit Skip then all the messages on your phone will be flagged as already backed up and will be ignored.

The backup process will start, and depending on how many messages you have, will take anywhere from a minute to a half hour to complete. It clips along at about a message per second:

 Fig7: Back-up Progress Screen

You don’t even have to wait until the process is finished to jump over to the Gmail account and check the progress. Login to your Gmail account from a web browser. You’ll see a new label in the sidebar, SMS. Click on it:

Fig8: Gmail Inbox Screen

Cool…! SMS Backup+ automatically backs up your SMS messages as well as your MMS messages. Not only are all of our text messages there but the pictures we’ve sent back and forth are backup up to Gmail along with the messages. Now that we’ve got everything humming along, let’s look at some advanced options.

From the main screen tap Auto backup to turn it on and then tape on Auto backup settings to configure the frequency. The default configuration is a bit aggressive. You may wish to, as we did, decrease the frequency of backups and even set it to only backup one Wi-Fi if you’re backing up a lot of MMS and don’t want to burn through your mobile data quota.

After you’ve set up the automatic backup, return to the main screen and head into advanced settings. There you can change the settings for backing up, restoring, and notifications. Under Backup there are some useful settings you may wish to toggle include turning off MMS backup (again, to save on data consumption, and creating a white list of contacts you want backed up (instead of the default where every single message is backed up).

 Fig9:Gmail Inbox Screen

There isn’t much to look at under the Restore settings, but you can take advantage of a handy Gmail-centric trick. When SMS Backup+ stores your messages in Gmail it creates a thread for each contact. You can tell SMS Backup+ to only restore the contacts with starred threads which allows you to quickly select which conversations are important enough to restore via the star system in Gmail.

So there you have it! All your text messages (including multimedia attachments) are backed up within Gmail where you can easily search them and restore them to your handset should the need arise.