Samsung Galaxy S III gets rooted, let the games Begin

Are you one of the over 9 million people eagerly awaiting your Samsung Galaxy S III to arrive? Even if you aren’t one of the lucky ones just yet, you might like to know that the next Galaxy already has root achieved. Are you even surprised? Samsung and the Galaxy line of devices have always been fairly easily rooted and ready to rock before launch, or darn near close to it. Boy do we love Samsung. Unfortunately the “insecure” kernel needed to gain root isn’t available just yet. Fears of it being traceable to the leaker are preventing it from hitting the masses. While this is sad news, we fully understand and don’t want anyone to get into trouble or lose their jobs. Root was achieved by Chainfire, whom many of you should know by now. He provides a lot to the Android community and has his hands in many things you probably use everyday. Check out exactly what he has to say about the whole thing.

Unfortunately, I am not able to share the “insecure” kernel with you at the moment, because of fears it is traceable to the leaker (this is said to be the last traceable firmware revision).

This root is, as expected, trivial. It was a simple matter of repacking the stock kernel, with a modified adbd binary that thinks ro.secure=0 (even if ro.secure=1). This gives access to all adb root commands (see screenshots). Then SuperSU was installed manually.

Kernel

The modification was trivial, because this time around, Samsung is using the standard boot.img format, instead of the zImage format used for SGS1, SGS2, SGNote, etc, that is much harder to repackage.

This is also why I don’t feel particularly bad about not giving you the insecure kernel – any serious dev on this board can do the same thing in 10 minutes.

Recovery

The recovery partition is also being used this time around. And thus we can flash recoveries separately from the kernel.

Bootloaders

There was no warning triangle at boot-up after flashing the modified kernel, but download mode did show a custom kernel flash counter which increased. Whether or not flashing a custom recovery also triggers this counter is as of yet unknown.

Final note

This was all tested on a current (release candidate) SGS3 firmware. There may be a newer firmware on true retail/production devices. Though some things may change, it is unlikely to change much. Let’s hope nothing 

Also, Triangle Away did not work. They have hidden the boot partitions again as on the latest SGNote firmwares.

(No, I don’t have an SGS3 yet, everything was done remotely)

Now, everybody say thanks to Samsung! I don’t always agree with them, but so far they have been the first and IMHO still are the only high-end Android OEM who aren’t complete douchebags in the unlock department!

I don’t know about you guys, but I personally love Samsung. Even if they are slow to update their devices. This news pretty much locks down the SGSIII as my next device. Anyone else even more excited now that we know root is a cake walk?

Source: XDA