[Nexus 6  General] doitright:
WARNING: This is not a place for you to come to say how great you think Chainfire is. I'm not calling his character into question, only his methodologies and the character of the outfit he sold out to (and I don't question the act of selling out, that's business, pays the bills, and puts kids through college). The debates about what people prefer and why are as old as the first software. And of course, I will not tell you what to do, no matter how much I disagree with you. If you UNDERSTAND what I have to say, then THIS software is for you. If you don't, you are probably better off with binaries.

The root situation on Android 5.x left a lot to be desired. There was basically just one distributor of a functional substitute user command (su), and it was binary. Recently, ownership of that binary and all of its history has become the property of a previously unknown legal entity called "Coding Code Mobile Technology LLC". While it was presented as a positive thing that that entity has a great involvement with android root control, this is actually a VERY frightening development.

There are precisely two motives I can imagine for buying up all the root control software for Android;

1) monetizing it, which is contrary to the user's best interests,

2) something very frightening and dangerous involving the potential exploitation of everybody's devices.

You don't know the owners, and they are distributing a binary, so who the heck knows WHAT is going on.

Now a few important considerations with respect to your security and privacy;

1) Obfuscated binary cannot be sanely audited.

2) Function of this binary depends on the ability to manipulate selinux policies on the fly, including RELOADING the policy altogether and replacing it with something possibly completely different. Frankly, I've never heard a single reason why this should be necessary.

3) While a root control application may give you nice audits over other software that is using its service, it can *EASILY* lie about what it is doing itself. It can delete logs, it can share root with other applications that they have made deals with, it can directly sell you out to spammers, etc.

That is WAY too dangerous, and not worth the risk.

Frankly, you are safer if you disable selinux AND nosuid, and just run the old style of root where you set a copy of sh as 6755. And that is FRIGHTENINGLY dangerous.

So not satisfied with this state of root, and especially now with a new unknown entity trying to control the world, we bring you the rebirth of the ORIGINAL Superuser:

https://github.com/phhusson/Superuser

https://github.com/lbdroid/AOSP-SU-PATCH (this one is mine)

From the history of THAT Superuser:

http://www.koushikdutta.com/2008/11/fixing-su-security-hole-on-modified.html

Yes, look at the Superuser repo above and see whose space it was forked from.

Note: This is a work in progress, but working VERY well.

Use my patch against AOSP to generate a new boot.img, which includes the su binary.

Features:

1) selinux ENFORCING,

2) sepolicy can NOT be reloaded.

3) It is NOT necessary (or recommended) to modify your system partition. You can run this with dm-verity!

The source code is all open for you to audit. We have a lot of plans for this, and welcome suggestions, bug reports, and patches.

UPDATE NOVEMBER 19: We have a new github organization to... "organize" contributions to all of the related projects. It is available at https://github.com/seSuperuser

UPDATE2 NOVEMBER 19: We have relicensed the code. All future contributions will now be protected under GPLv3.

*** Regarding the license change; according to both the FSF and the Apache Foundation, GPLv3 (but not GPLv2) is forward compatible with the Apache License 2.0, which is the license we are coming from. http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html . What this means, is that it is *ILLEGAL* for anyone to take any portion of the code that is contributed from this point onward, and use it in a closed source project. We do this in order to guarantee that this VITAL piece of software will remain available for EVERYONE in perpetuity.