Thursday, March 5, 2020

Project Sandcastle: Android for the iPhone

Corellium (tweet):

The iPhone restricts users to operate inside a sandbox. But when you buy an iPhone, you own the iPhone hardware. Android for the iPhone gives you the freedom to run a different operating system on that hardware.

Android for the iPhone has many exciting practical applications, from forensics research to dual-booting ephemeral devices to combatting e-waste.

The source is here.

Corellium:

By leveraging our virtual devices, along with our deep knowledge of both the Android OS and the iPhone hardware, we were able to rapidly iterate to bring Android to life.

[…]

Unfortunately, Android developers enshrined the 4kB page size in the build system, breaking AArch64 convention; third-party applications containing binary libraries built for these small pages will not be able to start on our Android port and will need to be rebuilt. It’s not intrinsically hard - one or two command-line options - but it can’t be done if all you have is an APK.

Less limiting is the lack of 32-bit code support on our platform. While Android these days requires support for pure 64-bit systems from application developers, the system itself still has moldy chunks of 32-bit only code in unexpected places.

Update (2020-03-06): Isaiah Carew:

this is kind of mind blowing -- running Android on iOS.

i’d prefer the opposite. i’d like to be able to run iOS on generic hardware.

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