Practical Mobile Forensics - Third Edition

Securing the USB debugging bypass in Android 4.4.2

As explained in the earlier sections, the secure USB debugging feature introduced in Android 4.4.2 allows only authorized workstations to connect to the device. However, there's a bug in this feature as reported at https://labs.mwrinfosecurity.com/ which allows bypassing the Secure USB debugging feature and connecting the device to any workstation. Here are the steps to follow to bypass Secure USB debugging on an Android device:

1. On an unlocked device, attempt to use adb and observe that an error message is shown by the device.
2. Now, navigate to either the emergency dialer or the lock-screen camera and execute the following commands:

$ adb kill-server
$ adb shell  

3. Observe that the confirmation ...