Google TV Hackers Open a Shell on the Chromecast; More Hacks To Follow

[wraggster]

Via Engadget comes the news that Google's latest (and quickly sold-out) toy, the Chromecast, may soon be hacked out of one-trick-pony status (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/26/inside_googles_chromecast_media_streamer/); just a few days after it came out, the folks at GTV Hacker have successfully turned their attention to the Chromecast, andmanaged to exploit the device's bootloader and spawn a root shell (http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/28/chromecast-bootloader-exploit-video-hack/). Some interesting findings, as explained in their blog post (http://blog.gtvhacker.com/2013/chromecast-exploiting-the-newest-device-by-google/): "[I]t’s actually a modified Google TV release, but with all of the Bionic / Dalvik stripped out and replaced with a single binary for Chromecast. Since the Marvell DE3005 SOC running this is a single core variant of the 88DE3100, most of the Google TV code was reused. So, although it’s not going to let you install an APK or anything, its origins: the bootloader, kernel, init scripts, binaries, are all from the Google TV. We are not ruling out the ability for this to become a Google TV 'stick.'"

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/28/1629227/google-tv-hackers-open-a-shell-on-the-chromecast-more-hacks-to-follow