Monday, April 15, 2013

How to fake running Ubuntu on an Android tablet

It is easy to fake the running of Ubuntu Linux on an Android device. In fact it is easy to fake the operation of Windows (any version), OSX and any other operating system that there is a VNC Viewer available.

I found this out when I was investigating the use of a tablet as a web administration tool. I was also interested to see how I could run Microsoft Office from an Android device as I was a little disappointed with the Polaris Office that came on the device that I purchased.

Below is a screenshot of an Ubuntu webserver log as seen on an Asus Transformer:

This technique would be particularly useful if you had a particular application running on a Linux box and you wanted to demonstrate the operation of that app on an Android device. As far as the viewer of a demonstration is concerned it would appear that the program is running on the Android device when in truth it is running remotely on the desktop device that VNC is connected.
Running an application remotely would be a great way to demonstrate the concept of an Android App that you had designed a front end (GUI) for and you have not yet managed to port natively to Linux running on an Android device. For example: if you had aircrack-ng running on a Linux machine you could demonstrate it running on an Android tablet and you could show the penetration of a WiFi network. You could also demonstrate the operation of more complex programs, even the highjacking of an aircraft and show that you are sending false telemetry to the aircraft control systems.

Of course, I am not saying that this is what the potential vendors of Android apps do at hacker conventions, I am merely suggesting that it could be done. The concept of whether something is possible given enough time seems to be a popular ruse.

I have detailed the use of using VNC to remotely control other computing devices on my website:

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