[Q] Crazy anti-theft idea

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bse88

New member
Feb 21, 2012
4
0
Hello people,
I have been playing with some crazy idea for a while. I know that exist a lot of anti-theft apps where you can send a message to your stolen and it performs a certain task like taking a picture or start an alarm or something like that.
So I have started to think about the possibility of a more radical idea like being able to send a sms to your stolen phone that would cause some kind of irreversible damage. Something that could fry your phone internal components like a killer overclocking.

I dunno, I just thought that it would be a cool sweet revenge.
 

Joe333x

Senior Member
Oct 6, 2009
1,070
123
99% of the time if some steals your phone the first thing they do is throw away your sim card.
 

bse88

New member
Feb 21, 2012
4
0
And what about sending a message through your Google Account? I think I once tried an apk that was able to send message using your gmail account.
 

Aerocaptain

Senior Member
Sep 23, 2010
168
26
Cleveland
Better idea would be to throw a false reset option in the settings that reformats the phone to make the phone appear to have been reset but GPS, and various owner enabled services would still be on and accessible via computer manipulation.....or predefined actions.

Sent from CDMA V6 SC GNexus w/Liquid & Franco.kernel
 
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TamCore

Senior Member
Jul 8, 2010
665
649
31
Düsseldorf
tamcore.eu
It should be easy to hard brick the phone. A little "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/... bs=512 count=1" to all partitions on the phone should do the trick :)

An App with a hardcoded config in /system/app would survive a Factory Reset :)
 
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Buckylastard

Member
Apr 19, 2012
32
9
I much rather would like to catch the thief who stole my phone instead of frying the phone.

My phone got stolen last month and even though I had some kind of find phone feature, I couldn't look it up. They should made something based on the IMEI# of the phone to track it instead of the sim card and account, which could easily be replaced.
 

KemikalElite

Senior Member
Jan 28, 2011
664
228
Google Pixel 3
OnePlus 7 Pro
I've had an idea for improving anti theft.

The one flaw in hardcore solutions like avast mobile and Cerberus is that they are rendered useless when a new ROM is flashed or the system partition is wiped. I know avast is supposed to have an option to be added to the backup list on CyanogenMod based ROMs, but for some reason it never works for me. Maybe because it could have been designed for CM7 and not CM9.

Anyway, the solution to the issue would be adding the anti theft program to another protected partition other than the android system. OEMs use additional partitions for the HBOOT or ODIN. An encrypted partition would make it secure. I know Ubuntu has some sort LVM encryption.

Or, restricting access to the custom recovery menu by locking it with a pass code. The issue with that might be where to store that pass code. Of course you could just reflash a stock recovery to prevent writing to the system partition, but who wants to do that?

So there's a basic description of the flaw now it just needs to be fixed somehow. I'm not good with actual coding so I'd leave that to the developers.

Sent from my Amazon Kindle Fire using Tapatalk 2
 

daasguy

Senior Member
Nov 12, 2009
178
10
I much rather would like to catch the thief who stole my phone instead of frying the phone.

My phone got stolen last month and even though I had some kind of find phone feature, I couldn't look it up. They should made something based on the IMEI# of the phone to track it instead of the sim card and account, which could easily be replaced.

I would rather blow up my phone along with the hand of the thief.
 

jader13254

Senior Member
May 25, 2012
5,928
17,917
Hamburg
U add an app to system/app and this app popup every 12h and want a code like "xdgfr" and u have 10 seconds after first touch of code, if u dont write in ur phone vibrates 20 seconds and than u must insert again code if not ---> hard brick :)

Sent from my LT18i using xda premium
 

kuisma

Senior Member
Jun 30, 2009
360
216
Sweden
whiteboard.ping.se
  1. Install a ssh server such as dropbear, starting from init.rc
  2. Install an IPv6 6in4 tunnel.
Now you got access to your phone via ssh and a unique IPv6 address, reachable wherever the phone is, behind NATs, firewalls, on cellular nets etc.

If it gets stolen, just access it and decide the best action ...
 

Isaygarcia

Senior Member
Jan 8, 2007
477
8
Monterrey
Just :

A new encrypted partition that can only be deleted by the user entering a password, this partition will store a pre-configured program that will detect the state of the rom, stolen-alarm, will store credentials (for accessing the main security account, data and networks) and will take actions depending on that configuration or direct access from the user(Via ssh or a custom UI).

What about that?

It doesn't need to be a large partition, just large enough to save that data.