Google Glass, restrictions bypassed: to give users full control of its Android operating system.

Reported first by Forbes, it might be now possible to bypass restrictions imposed by Google on Google Glass. This means according to Developer Jay Freeman and Liam McLoughlin, who own the device and tested it: full control of its Android operating system.

Jay Freeman announced his success on Twitter Friday afternoon, and told Andy Greenberg, in a phone interview that he discovered yesterday that Glass runs Android

4.0.4, and ‘’immediately began testing previously-known exploits that worked on that version of Google’s mobile operating system. Within hours, he found that he could use an exploit released by a hacker who goes by the name B1nary last year to gain full control of Glass’s operating system.’’

 

A photo of Freeman's Google Glass display he took to demonstrate that he had gained "root" access to the device.

Freeman speculates that jailbreaking Glass could make it possible to store data locally on the device or on Bluetooth-linked phone, rather than upload it automatically to Google’s servers.

Freeman also said he was able to hack Glass using the device’s debug mode and a flaw in its backup function that tricks the device into thinking it’s running as an emulation on a developer’s machine.

‘’You take a backup from the device, modify the backup, and then restore the modified backup to the device. While the backup is restoring, you make a change to the data being restored that redirects the data being restored to overwrite a critical configuration file. This makes the device think that it is not running on real hardware: you make it think it is instead running on the emulator used by Android developers to test their software on desktop/laptop computers. As the emulator is designed for developers, it has full control and gives you “root”.’’

According to the blog 9to5Google, another developer named Liam McLoughlin had already achieved root access to Glass.