Well, this is fun. Minutes after I completed and published my post further detailing how to root your EVO, I catch a teaser for ‘unrevoked’ - a ‘painless’ EVO rooting method that’s to be released tomorrow. Unrevoked is the work of Matt Mastracci, who gave us our first sneak peek at a rooted EVO, and one of the developers who contributed to the hack.

As Matt details here, there are several critical security flaws present in the custom Sprint software included on the EVO, and these flaws were the driving force behind releasing an easy ‘anyone can do it’ rooting method for the EVO. According to Matt, no EVO is actually safe unless it has been rooted, and he even recommends against purchasing the EVO and Sprint Hero altogether. In fact, it’s with the very exploits presented by the Sprint software that’s present on both the Hero and the EVO 4G with which he is able to accomplish the ‘painless’ root.

He doesn’t get into the technical details of the problems he found, but he does mention that there are several exploits, not just one, and that ‘an Android application could get access to all of your data with very little work’. He goes on to advocate that handset manufacturers and phone carriers take a more Google/Nexus One like approach to phone hardware, rather than an Apple-esque approach:

To handset manufacturers and carriers: if you give users to freedom to customize their devices, we’ll work with you directly to make sure those same users aren’t vulnerable out-of-the-box. Be more like Google and less like Apple and you’ll get an army of white-hats working to improve your product.

Can’t say I disagree with him there. It took me all of 2 minutes to have my Nexus One ready to be rooted once I powered it up after unboxing it.

We’ll keep an eye out for the release of Unrevoked tomorrow, but if you’d like to get a head start, you can hit our guide here to get your root on.

Source: Grack.com here, and here

Via: Boy Genius Report