Last week, my Nexus 10 tablet arrived in the mail. I ordered this tablet with a few purposes in mind, but foremost was my intention to run Kali Nethunter on it. I chose this particular tablet, because the forums seemed to indicate few issues with this device, the screen size is quite nice (for a tablet,) and it doesn’t have cell phone capabilities. I specifically wanted a tablet that only worked with local wifi, and not cellular networks. I chose the 32 gig version, because there is no documented way to increase the local storage.
The package arrived, and my wife texted me that it looked a bit beat up. When she showed me a picture of the package, my first thought was the opening scene from Ace Ventura. The device itself was okay, thankfully, so I placed an order for a tablet case/cover with keyboard, and began prepping the tablet for its new function in life.
The first evening, I allowed the tablet to update as far as it could, then went into the System Updates and selected updates manually until it went from Android 4.2.2 to 5.1.1. After each major update, I powered the tablet off and turned it back on. This took most of the evening, so I installed Netflix on it, and my wife and I curled up to watch the last episode of Blacklist available on the streaming service before going to sleep.
The next day, I downloaded the tools to my linux laptop for dealing with unlocking and rooting the device. The table of supported devices at the Kali Nethunter page said that Android 5.1.1 would be sufficient, but that the device would need to be unlocked and rooted, so that was the goal.
I downloaded android-studio-ide-145.3360264-linux.zip from https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html and extracted the zip file. Then I changed directories to android-studio/bin and ran “./studio.sh” to set up the initial installation. Unfortunately, this wasn’t what I needed or wanted, but I didn’t know that at the time. Once I figured out why things weren’t looking the way I expected, I went back to the developer site and found out that you need to scroll way down the page to get the actual file needed. I went up a directory and removed the files from this initial bad download.
I downloaded android-sdk_r24.4.1-linux.tgz this time, and extracted the tarball. I changed directories to Changed directories to android-sdk-linux and ran tools/android. I went through the GUI but it was having issues with updating, so I went to “Selected Tools => Options” and checked the “Force https//… sources to use http://…” check box to deal with the “peer not authenticated” errors. I assumed these were caused by our corporate gateway that cracks open SSL for inspection, and turning this on did indeed work.
From there, I went to the “Packages” list and selected the “Android 5.1.1(API 22)” packages. I selected all of these, and told it to install the packages, accepted the license, and then hit “install.” I exited the SDK GUI, but had to come back to this and do this step again after connecting to the tablet later down. This step only installed two items, and there were well more than two needed before I was through.
On the tablet, I swiped down twice to click the settings gear, went ot “About tablet” and tapped the “Build number LMY49J” seven times to put the tablet into developer’s mode. It indicated as much with “You are now a developer.” I went back one screen and selected “Developer Options” which was now available, and turned on “USB debugging.” At this point, I plugged the tablet into the computer using the USB cable supplied with the tablet.
I ran a “dmesg” on the laptop to confirm it was seen as a new device, then ran “platform-tools/adb devices” to verify it was seen by the developer tools suite.
At this point, I re-ran the GUI tool “tools/android” and selected the rest of the files that were missing for my tablet. Once they were all installed, I was able to do the “platform-tools/adb devices” command again.
To put the device into fastboot mode, I ran “platform-tools/adb reboot bootloader” and while the tablet was at the fastboot menu, I ran the following command from the laptop to unlock the device:
platform-tools/fastboot devices
sudo platform-tools/fastboot oem unlock
If the first command (fastboot devices) doesn’t show your device, even if adb devices does, something is wrong and more troubleshooting is needed. Otherwise, go ahead and do the fastboot oem unlock at this point.
My table rebooted and seemed to be stuck in a boot loop. The graphic with the four swirley colorful dots never seemed to stop, so I did some online research and found that this device is known for getting in a boot loop after the unlock. The solution is to go back to fastboot mode by holding down both volume up and volume down as well as the power button (all three) until it reboots. Once it is back in fastboot mode, use the volume buttons until the menu says “RECOVERY MODE.” Push the power button again, and let it “recover.”
Because it took me some time to figure out how to get it out of the boot loop, I spent the rest of that evening letting it recover from the online backup it had made, then headed to bed with my wife.
On day three, I set up all of the developer tools again, put the tablet back into “Developer mode,” and hooked it up to the computer. I downloaded nethunter-manta-lollipop-3.0.zip via https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux-nethunter-download/ to my laptop. I also downloaded TWRP (Team Win Recovery Project) from https://twrp.me/site/update/2016/04/05/twrp-3.0.2-0-released.html per the recommendations on the Nethunter Wiki. The file was twrp-3.0.2-0-manta.img in case you’re following along.
In order to install twrp, I changed directories to the android-sdk-linux/platform-tools directory from the day before, and ran:
adb reboot bootloader
sudo fastboot recover twrp-3.0.2-0-manta.img
I installed via the menu options, then pushed the nethunter image across with:
adb push nethunter-manta-lollipop-3.0.zip /data/local/tmp/nethunter-manta-lollipop-3.0.zip
Back on the tablet, I navigated up, then back down to the appropriate location data => local => tmp.
I selected the ZIP file and told it to install, answered the questions presented, and rebooted.
Unfortunately, something went wrong with the installation using this method. Some more research, and I found that I could repair this by uninstalling the individual nethunter applications and then installing the latest “APK” file, instead. This meant I needed to get the latest.apk. I also needed to install SuperSU, which was an option that was unchecked by default in the ZIP install menu.
I went to Google Play to install SuperSU, then continued with the APK installation as below.
I opened chrome and selected the following URL to get the APK needed:
https://images.offensive-security.com/latest.apk
I then installed that by selecting it through the downloads folder, and it installed better. I’m not sure it installed perfectly, yet, but it at least has the nethunter app, now.
I then had to set Nethunter to be allowed with super user privileges by SuperSU.
Unfortunately, it says there’s no busybox, and I’m not sure if that got missed by the APK, or if something else is going on. TWRP wants to install a BusyBox app, but it’s not the one built into the Nethunter suite. I may go ahead and install that one, but I’d rather have the one provided by Nethunter.
Due to the extreme hecticness of this holiday season, I haven’t had an opportunity to really play with this, yet, but I will go through and work with it some more so that I can do a decent write up of some of its features, before I’m through. In the mean time, I’ll return to covering the Hak5 LAN Turtle modules next week.
Thanks for reading!