Adding Root Certificates to Android Phone with root access
Yeah, after being really busy with my real life, here is another intresting trick for you:
How to get some more root certificates on an android phone where you have root acces (or, at least, you can start & use root explorer).
Some background info:
I use a funabol community server to keep my phone’s and outlook’s in sync and recently my colleague sven did a great job converting my HTC HD2 with winmobile to Android 2.x (kudo’s to him! thanks!).
Update on 2011-12-27: I changed the client to allow self-signed certificates: here
The challenge is that if you use funabol with self signed ssl certificates you need to get those recognized by android which is a really complicated task if you don’t know how. But here we go:
What you need before (and what i don’t describe):
- a rooted phone + root explorer. You NEED to be able to write to /etc/security/ in “RW” mode.
- a working funambol installation with ssl configured (see here: http://wiki.ow2.org/sync4j/Wiki.jsp?page=HowtouseHttps)
Our steps include:
- Export the certificate out of the funambol java keystore
- Get the cacert.bks from the android device
- modify the cacerts.bks of android
- reboot and finished
Step 1 – Export the funambol certificate
- Execute “%JAVA_HOME%\bin\keytool -export -alias tomcat -file myroot.cer” (in-detail like here)
- copy the myroot.cer to the SD-Card of the android device (or download to another computer)
Step 2
- insert the SD-Card to the android device, startup root explorer and navigate to /etc/security/
- copy the file cacert.bks
- navigate to /sd-card and paste the file
- insert to another computer
- Go and execute the Portecle Keytool and open the cacerts.bks from your SD-Card
- When promtes for a password, just hit enter
- go to Tools -> Import Key Pair and select your myroot.cer, give it any name you want
- save the cacerts.bks
- re-insert the SD-Card to android device
- open up root explorer, head to /sd-card, copy, paste to /etc/security/
- make sure root explorer show “mounted as r/w” in the header of the program.
- set permissions of the newly copied cacert.bks to rw-r–r– (owner,group,other: read owner:write)
Step 3
- double check if the permissions of cacerts.bks are set correctly to rw-r–r–
- restart the phone
- funambol sync should now complete.
Have phun to be in sync!
P.S. Keep in touch! the next xbee’s blogpost’s are half-way written, but i really don’t have time ATM… sry
