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Secure mode

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dtmilano edited this page Apr 24, 2013 · 23 revisions

AndroidViewClient has two possible back-ends:

UiAutomator works on Android API 16 and higher, so if your device has a previous version your only alternative is ViewServer.

System ViewServer is started only when the device is not considered secure.

    private boolean isSystemSecure() {
        return "1".equals(SystemProperties.get(SYSTEM_SECURE, "1")) &&
                "0".equals(SystemProperties.get(SYSTEM_DEBUGGABLE, "0"));
    }

The properties involved to consider a device secure are

private static final String SYSTEM_SECURE = "ro.secure";
private static final String SYSTEM_DEBUGGABLE = "ro.debuggable";

This oneliner can be used to test these properties

$ (eval $(adb shell getprop | dos2unix | egrep '\[ro\.secure]|\[ro\.debuggable]' | sed 's/\./_/g; s/]: /=/g; s/[][]//g'); [[ 1 == $ro_secure && 0 == $ro_debuggable ]] && echo "System is secure: AVC won't work" || echo "System is not secure: AVC will work")

when run, this oneliner will tell you if AndroidViewClient could work on your device:

System is secure: AVC won't work

If you run it against any emulator (which is always not secure) it will return

System is not secure: AVC will work

dump.py

dump.py is one of the examples provided with AndroidViewClient source. In its latest version if provides a --verbose option that will give you extra information about your device:

$ ./dump.py --verbose
Connecting to a device with serialno=.* with a timeout of 60 secs...
Connected to device with serialno=.*
dump.py: ERROR: Device is secure, AndroidViewClient won't work.
    secure=1 debuggable=0 version=15 ignoresecuredevice=False

See detailed information about dump.py.

Hierarchyviewer

hierarchyviewer is one of the standard Android tools (now deprecated in favor of tools/monitor) and it's described here.

For its operation hierarchyviewer uses the same ViewServer as AndroidViewClient so if you have doubts about it working on your device just try to run

$ hierarchyviewer

and if you receive a message like this

00:00:00 E/hierarchyviewer: Unable to debug device 0123456789

then neither AndroidViewClient or hierarchyviewer will work unless you follow (at your own risk) some of the instructions mentioned in Resources.

Resources

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