Five years ago, I bought a Supernote A5. It was (and mostly still is) a great device for reading and writing on an eInk display, and it runs plain old linux.

The deciding reason I went for this device instead of the competition is that I was “under the impression” that they were about to enable full SSH access to the device! Awesome!

“Why were you under that impression?”, I hear the skeptics ask. Well, their spokesperson has stated that they would do so. Via mail, and on reddit, publicly, multiple times. I was still torn, so sent them a DM, asking if this was ineed factual. “Yes”, they said, “the next quarterly update will enable SSH access!”.

Great!

Well, it’s been 5 years. They did not follow through. A couple updates were published, none contained the promised functionality, the spokesperson stopped answering questions about SSH. The last software update I received is from 2.5yrs ago. Mentions of the original Supernote A5 have largely been scrubbed from their website.

Let me be clear, the device still functions perfectly. But it is in danger of becoming e-waste because it is so needlessly complicated to get stuff on the device. I’m currently in need of an ebook reader with (ideally) OPDS capability, and I am pretty confident I’d be able to get something like koreader running on this, or at least just run a script to sync files over SSH. Also, I frankly feel wounded in my pride having a Linux device in my possession which refuses to do my bidding (I’m joking of course, but also I am 100% serious).

Here’s all I know:

  • plugging it in via USB, the device reads as an MTP device, with access only to the documents/books/… stored on it
  • you can place an update.zip file (obtained from the SN website) into the root of that MTP directory, and upon reboot, the device will update. To me, this appears to be the most promising route of gaining access.
  • unfortunately, the zip file is encrypted. The decryption key clearly has to be known to the device, but since I have no access to it,…

I’m a software engineer, but I have zero knowledge of the “dark arts”, so to speak. If anyone could help me (or point me into the right direction!), I would really be grateful. I don’t want this (generally nice) product to turn into a paperweight instead of a paper replacement :(

  • @[email protected]
    62•1 month ago

    The entries in update.zip are encrypted using the weak ZipCrypto scheme, which is known to be seriously flawed. If you feel motivated, and can guess at least 12 bytes of plaintext for an entry, it is possible to recover the internal state of the generator, which is enough to decipher the data entirely, as well as other entries which were encrypted with the same password. The bkcrack project implements this attack.

    Since some of the entries are zip files themselves, it is within the realm of possibility to guess 12 bytes of plaintext. Parts of the zip local file header are pretty static, and you can use some of the values from the local file header of update.zip itself. Still, this would require a bit of luck / inspired guesswork.

    • @[email protected]OP
      24•1 month ago

      Oh, wow. I am so giving this a try. Huge kudos for checking the zip itself, btw! Thank you :D

      Just for clarification though, do I need 12 bytes of the original content or of the compressed (but unencrypted) byte-representation of the zip file?

      Edit: Ah, the repo links the paper. Reading now :)

      • @[email protected]
        23•1 month ago

        The attack worked, the password is cmF0dGEK.

        This was obtained by generating 32 possible plaintexts for the first 10 bytes of system.zip (based on the different values in the headers of ~300 zip files on my system), plus three null bytes for the high bytes of compressed size, file name length and extra field length.

        • @[email protected]OP
          10•1 month ago

          No way!! You’re the goat. I spent the day trying to get behind how the cracking worked by making simple examples, and you just… Solve the puzzle :D

          Awesoms, thank you so much!! I’ll appreciate update this thread if this leads to something :D

          • @[email protected]English
            6•1 month ago

            I did quickly check the files on update.zip and it looks like they’re tarballs embedded in a shell script and image files including pretty much the whole operating system on the thing.

            You can extract those even without a VM and do whatever you want with the files and package them back up, so, you can override version checks and you can inject init.d scripts, binaries and pretty much everything to the device, including changing passwords to /etc/shadow and so on.

            I don’t know how the thing actually operates, but if it isn’t absolutely necessary I’d leave bootloader (appears to be uboot) and kernel untouched as messing up those might end up with a bricked device and then easy options are broken and you’ll need to try to gain access via other means, like interfacing directly with the storage on the device (which most likely includes opening the thing up and wiring something like arduino or an serial cable to it).

            But beyond that, once you override version checks, it should be possible to upload the same version number over and over again until you have what you need. After that you just need suitable binaries for the hardware/kernel, likely some libraries from the same package and a init-script and you should be good to go.

            The other way you can approach this is to look for web server configurations from the image and see if there’s any vulnerabilities (like apache running as root and insecure script on top of that to inject system files via http), which might be the safest route at least for a start.

            I’m not really experienced on a things like this, but I know a thing or two about linux, so do your homework before attempting anything, have a good luck and have fun while tinkering!

            • @[email protected]OP
              3•1 month ago

              Thanks! Yep, same thought about the version checks. I’ll spin up a VM for now and see if that allows for suitable experimentation, otherwise fingers crossed I don’t brick the device.

              The web-server thing is probably safer, agreed, but packaging my own update is just so much more tempting… :D

          • @MTK
            6•1 month ago

            Check out the file update.zip > system.zip > zImage

            It’s the image for the device probably, check this guide out

            https://jamchamb.net/2022/01/02/modify-vmlinuz-arm.html

            You can probably get some sort of boot script implanted in there, or even just load the image in a vm, modify it, and recreate it.

            You might also need to modify the install script there since it seems to check if the update already exists and it might not run thinking you are up to date.

            • @[email protected]OP
              7•1 month ago

              Fantastic.

              Since the zip also includes a bunch of shell scripts, I think it’s possible I could also just install ssh directly - but the image will certainly make experimenting in a VM the safer option until something works out… ^^

              Oh man, I can’t wait to get home from work on Friday (currently stuck on the other side of the country 🫠)

              Edit: also, can I somehow buy you a beer/coffee somewhere digitally?

              • @MTK
                6•1 month ago

                Nah, I’m good, 0v0 did the work. this was fun!

                Keep us posted :)

      • @[email protected]
        21•1 month ago

        The inner zip files are just stored, uncompressed:

        Archive: update.zip
Index Encryption Compression CRC32    Uncompressed  Packed size Name
----- ---------- ----------- -------- ------------ ------------ ----------------
    0 ZipCrypto  Store       d1bca061     65761967     65761979 system_lib.zip
    1 ZipCrypto  Deflate     64a3f383         2183          741 config.json
    2 ZipCrypto  Store       3731280f     89300292     89300304 app.zip
    3 ZipCrypto  Store       a2bd64f5    135518964    135518976 app_lib.zip
    4 ZipCrypto  Store       700eb186      5996410      5996422 system.zip

        So 12 bytes from the original content.

    • 56!
      3•1 month ago

      I had the same idea, and I’m trying it right now… Not something I’ve ever done before though.

  • @ikiddEnglish
    32•1 month ago

    If you get an OTG dongle, you might be able to get a keyboard on it and interrupt the bootloader, and/or boot to a USB thumbdrive.

      • @ikiddEnglish
        21•1 month ago

        Doing a bit more searching, it seems wishful. There’s no hacker community around for it like the reMarkable so I’m not very hopeful for you. OTOH, an OTG dongle is pretty cheap.

        Good luck.

    • @[email protected]OP
      20•1 month ago

      Thanks, but that’s the A5x, a newer Android version of the tablet (hard- and software are different)

  • @[email protected]English
    16•1 month ago

    Taking this to an extreme, if you can’t gain access via software (unlikely if it hasn’t been updated in 5 years), you could disassemble it, locate the SPI interface for the NAND (assuming it uses SPI), and use something like an arduino with a loaded SPI reader sketch to read it. You can then pick it apart to find vulnerabilities, or just replace it.

  • Atemu
    11•1 month ago

    Have you checked for open ports?

    There’s a non-zero chance that there’s a long out of date apache or something running on it.

    • @[email protected]OP
      7•1 month ago

      Yeah, good idea. They added a network “mirroring” functionality at some point, so SOMETHING is listening on some port.

  • Strit
    6•30 days ago

    Sounds more like an android device that an actual Linux device. Especially since it gets detected as an MTP device via USB.

    Maybe adb can see it.

  • @UnH1ng3d
    2•1 month ago

    Are you able to see what kernel version it’s running?

  • @CoreidanEnglish
    -4•1 month ago

    Format and reinstall.

    • @Reddfugee42English
      4•1 month ago

      Without SSH. Easy peasy right?

      • @CoreidanEnglish
        1•1 month ago

        Do you have physical access to the hardware? If so SSH is irrelevant.

        • @Reddfugee42English
          1•29 days ago

          In theory? Sure. In practice? Often not so trivial.

          • @CoreidanEnglish
            1•29 days ago

            Then throw that shit in the trash