16
Parzi
5y

imagine having kernel memory leaks in 2020

AT&T or Huawei, whichever, pushed an update for my already-struggling-to-exist phone that made the kernel memory leak go from 480KB/hr avg to 22.5MB/hr avg. When my free RAM is never under 50% of 2GB after the kernel starts loading other shit and i'm able to express free RAM, at any time in use, in megs, with 8 bits... this means my phone crashes, with no apps running aside from a trimmed list of stock apps, every 3-4 hours due to running out of RAM. The only usable (read: not R/O because unrooted) swapfile is located on a tmpfs, so it's completely fucking useless (and eats another 100MB of RAM that I could be using for LITERALLY anything else, that's like another 3 hours of full idle between crashes) and I can't unlock the bootloader to fix any of this as Huawei no longer hands out keys and it'd take 7 years or so to brute (32-bit @ 10/sec)

tl;dr: fuck

Comments
  • 2
    How do you measure this? I'd like to see mine too
  • 8
    @Xoka hopefully yours doesn't...
    I have a script on my PC that collects /proc/meminfo from the phone every like minute and parses it to track change over time while idle. When it fails, it assumes the phone died.
    I then run a (basic) copy of this on my phone itself (they left a folder in /data RWX lol) to make sure ADB didn't cause it.
    If the two sets agree within error margin, I average the data and can see the leak rate.
  • 1
    @Parzi Sounds interesting and complicated :/
  • 3
    I'd be willing to contribute compute time to break it. If enough people do the same we can give a big middle finger to the manufacturers.
  • 4
    ^ We need a Folding@Home for cracking bootloader keys
  • 1
    @Wisecrack @kescherRant enthusiasm is appreciated but that's to bruteforce, the phone itself can't accept more than 10/sec. There's no rhyme or reason to them, they're not encryption keys, they look more like factory-generated RNG.
  • 2
    @Parzi

    Well, if you know the procedure for encrypting some data and you have the keys, why couldn't you do it without the phone?

    @kescherRant thats a brilliant idea.
  • 1
    @Wisecrack They set PRNG streams as keys, as far as i'm aware. Meaning a bruteforce, which, at 32 bits and a hard limit of 10 tries a second, is around 7 years, if i'm not mistaken.

    The procedure was to beat on your keyboard till it sends 32 bits, which is then used as the unlock key.
  • 1
    @Parzi Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Is there no way to pull the encrypted data off the bios and save it to a regular machine to bruteforce?
  • 0
    @Wisecrack it's an android phone with no root. No. That'd require softroot at least.
  • 1
    @Parzi Can't dump the data, got it.

    That sucks.

    I wonder if they use the same keys for that model in other instances of the device? Maybe someone has already rooted one if thats the case.
  • 1
    @Wisecrack they're device-unique, sadly.
  • 1
  • 1
    easy - stop supporting Huawei
  • 1
    @qwwerty if only I were able to buy a OnePlus...

    sadly all I had was $40 so I had to pick the cheapest Android burner. No choice was involved.
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