Quote:
Originally Posted by mathrick
Thanks. Has anyone been working on it? Is it because it's too hard, or because there's no interest?
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The last time the device was rooted, it was because of a hole in a suid networking utility. They fixed that hole, and nothing new has been found. The number of suid root executables is small, so it's very possible that all of the holes are plugged.
The other option is to try to hack the firmware installation procedure, but that is complicated, and also seems to be secure. It looks like they use public/private keys to check for tampering in the firmware before installation, so pre-inserting stuff in the firmware to help with rooting would probably require getting ones hands on PB's private key. That's pretty unlikely, I would say.
The firmware contents aren't encrypted, so if you could write your own installer, you could modify the firmware contents, and install them on a device with an old enough firmware that can be rooted. You would have to pretty much duplicate the official upgrade procedure, which would be difficult because a lot of it is done by binary executables rather than shell scripts. Getting it wrong would likely leave one with a useless device (because the firmware installation procedure requires a working system). So, the odds are low, and the price is high.
Finally, PB has made the device pretty hackable without requiring root, so it's usually easier to find a way to do something without root than to try to figure out how to root the device.
Edit: the old rootable firmwares were for the Pro and previous models. I don't think the new models ever had a firmware version that could be rooted.