Hello there, Mr. hidden skype apk

So I’ve been reading all the hype about the new Skype application released on Verizon. Sadly I neither have a droid or any friends with a rooted droid. As one would assume, the apk is located in /data/app-private so I needed access to a rooted droid to get this app… Or do I?

Silly me, I forgot all the research I had done for Market Enabler! After a friend sent me their getprop I was off spoofing my values, no more than two minutes went by and ta-da! Got myself the new Skype application.

The following setprop commands must be run to gain access to the Verizon only part of the market.

setprop gsm.sim.operator.numeric 310004
setprop gsm.operator.numeric 31000
setprop gsm.operator.alpha “Verizon Wireless”
setprop gsm.sim.operator.alpha Verizon
setprop gsm.sim.operator.iso-country us
setprop gsm.operator.iso-country us

Note that you will need to restart your Vending (Market) application to have these values take affect, you can do that by running the following commands via a terminal:

# ps | grep vending
app_5     2699  75    181176 26384 ffffffff afe0dca4 S com.android.vending
# kill 2699

Pffhh, yea right...

Changing the properties..

Just randomly looking to do specific things with the Market, I finally figured out a way
to force the Market into accepting any certificate. It turns out there is actually a little bit
of code (leftover from testing?) that if special parameters are set, will allow you to
disable ssl certificate checking. This essentially allows us to well, do lots of things we
otherwise wouldn’t be able to do!

Obviously your going to need root to enable this - and I’m going to provide you the
way I’ve enabled it; using adb. Again like I’ve stated countless times, anything you do
via ADB you should be able to do via a console on the device, I’m not sure why people
always repaste everything and say just do it via a console thinking it’s some big news…
The two variables we’re going to have to set are ro.secure and
vending.disable_ssl_cert_check. Personally, my devices both have ro.secure
already set (properly) to 0. Vending.disable_ssl_cert_check is a new variable that we
will be creating, setting it to “TRUE”. Simply fire up adb and run the following
commands (as root);

setprop ro.secure 0
setprop vending.disable_ssl_cert_check TRUE

You can quickly run a “getprop” to verify you typed everything correctly; ro.secure
should be located as the first variable and the vending one is the last (since it is new).
You can verify that these settings are correct and working by watching your console
log for the Vending.apk via DDMS. The following string should appear while loading
the Market: “Turning off SSL certification check.” This can be seen below:

Also as a final reminder, every reboot these variables must be reset, since there is no program actually setting them already. You must reinitialize these variables (in my case, I only have to initialize vending.disable_ssl_cert_check) if you would like to use this mode.

Hopefully this will be of use to someone other than myself!

Finding the Android ID (img blacked out)

Note that this will NOT change the android id used by google products since they use one that is linked to your gmail account that the phone is associated with…

This bugged me a little bit because I wanted to know how the google applications where using and getting the android information - did they pull it directly from the hardware? Where they just using private API that was more secure? So after a little research, I found exactly what was going on, and again how it would be possible to spoof the id.

Essentially the google applications use googleapps to store the android id, this is the program on the phone named “com.google.android.googleapps”. This is a very interesting program that sadly developers do not have access to as of yet, though hopefully this will change shortly.

Anyway, this program is also susceptible to being force-fed spoofed values. The method is essentially the same as the previous one, though just performed on a different database. From within adb or the shell, do the following;

$sqlite3 /data/data/com.google.android.googleapps/databases/accounts.db
update system set value=’deadbeef0000badf00d’ where name=’androidId’;

This program also store in that table the imsi number linked to the phone, for simcard tracking purposes.