Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Exploiting a Nokia 1208? Why not?

There are simple things you are almost always sure of. Water pipes, electricity, central heating, cell phones... Ooops!
Did I say "cell phones"? In fact, most often than not, you could find some ways to hinder its' performance. Even for the smallest ones, the dumbest ones.

Take Nokia 1208, for example.
Who'd ever think that this "flashlight" phone, running sub-par version (is it S20, I'm not sure) can be exploited?

Now, don't hold your breath, the exploit is purely local - only phone's user can do it.
It can not be said of as a "security breach", just a fun with firmware, an example of attention needed for thorough and rigorous testing.

You can cause stack overflow and phone restart with the following routine:

1/ Press "Menu", go to "Messages"






2/ Select "Message Settings"

3/ You will see 10 items, starting with "Info Service". Note the number 1 in upper right.

4/ You can scroll down all 10 items, and you will roll back at "Info Service", number one.

5/ Press "Select", then press "Back". Notice the scroller on the scroll bar became smaller!


6/ Now, if you keep scrolling down, you will start passing numbers 11, 12, 13 and so on. The list got duplicated as result of step 5.

7/ Repeat step 4, going into "Info Message" and back. Try scrolling down again, looking up numbers and notice the increasing thinness of the scroller.



8/ Once you have appended list 6 times, you will pass number 71 "Info Service".






9/ One step down and boom - your phone restarts. Enjoy.

Of course this is very geeky and who cares about such kind of "local exploit" but hey - just for your fun and info!
Firmware RH-105 v3.72

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hehe, nice idea. I've got a phone like this, but I guess they updated the firmware. It doesn't work anymore.