For those of you that have used HTC devices before, you know how important S-Off is for modding your device. In case you don’t know what S-Off is, here’s a brief explanation.
S -Off is a security level stored on the device’s radio that checks signature images for any firmware before it is allowed to be written to system memory. Which makes it hard to use custom ROMs, images and kernels.
Until now, S-Off on the HTC One was not possible. But the Revolutionary dev team and the AlphaRev team have come together to achieve S-Off. Right now it’s a preview only, and it’s now available for everyone, but that should be coming soon.
The exploit takes the form of a single binary, which is pushed to /data/local/tmp which is a location where the user has free access to write files to using the adb service, and execute them from within. Run the prepare command in order to prepare the device fro the process of gaining S-Off. Then the next step is to unlock the bootloader, or locking it back.
Since you can easily reset flags like the tamper flag. You really have to question the usefulness of this “security” feature. Since it can be reset solely using software, which really doesn’t offer much protection, am I right? HTC continues to use S-On/S-Off so developers must continue finding exploits for it nonetheless.
If you’re using a HTC One, you’re probably very ecstatic to hear this news. Although they haven’t said when it’ll be released for everyone to achieve S-Off, I’m sure it won’t be too long. These developers normally work pretty quickly. Let us know in the comments below how excited you are about S-Off coming to your HTC One.
Source: XDA Developers