[Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra] DragonFire1024:
I have recently acquired the Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra. When I acquire new phones I generally take a look at all the settings, what applications are installed and whether I can remove them or do I need them, and various other things when getting a new device. I saw nothing out of the ordinary except for one thing. An application I have never seen before called 'AutoBlocker' this is an application developed by Samsung to help with security. To what level of security that remains to be seen as we will discover in this thread. I am posting this as a means to gather information as to why this application would exist and what it's purpose is.

The application and question 'AutoBlocker', with the package name of com.samsung.android.rampart, is a security, system application at least according to Samsung. There is not much to go on in terms of publicly available information about this application. So I decided to do a few things in order to figure out what it's purpose was. On the s23 I was able to install through the Play Store, an application that many of you are familiar with, 'SystemUITuner'. In order to be able to launch activities on the lock screen in Android 14 you need to download an additional application developed by the same author that allows system UI tuner to have certain system privileges that allow you to add shortcuts and other things to the lock screen. Given these privileges, system UI tuner can launch application shortcuts and activities that normally cannot be accessed otherwise. So we come to Auto blocker. Below I have posted a screenshot of the activities that are available to Launch with system UI tuner.

View attachment 6115804

Doesn't look like much right? So I thought as well. I was only able to Launch the first, second, and the fifth activities. The fifth one was the most interesting, com.samsung.android.rampart/.ui.DeveloperOptionActivity. Listed below in order are those activities via screenshots. The first two activities are basically the same with different launch paths. The last one is View attachment 6115837

the developers options below.

View attachment 6115838

Essentially the application is used to block certain ADB Commands and or actions. To what extent is really unknown. I have decompiled the application with Apk tool and it was not much help as there's not much inside there to look at. Therefore it does not explain to what extent ADB Commands are blocked aside from not allowing the installation of unknown applications or ones that could be considered dangerous or have a high security risk. It really is quite ironic because in a press release where Samsung talks about this application they, say they are dedicated to the "commitment to openness and user choice", but this application cannot be launched from their launcher, OneUI, and it is not available for the general user to open this application therefore the settings inside of it listed above are not available to the user. The only way to see if the application is installed is to look in the application list under system applications. Otherwise you will need to use the two applications mentioned in this thread or root access in order to launch the activities inside of it. You also are unable to toggle any of the settings inside this application even with system UI tuner. Though it doesn't seem like that the application is activated on default, that doesn't mean that it still can't block ADB Commands. So I guess my concern is what other reasons would you need to block ADB Commands on a device? Google / Android already has this safety measure covered and won't let you install unsafe applications without first agreeing to a disclaimer. Also most of the attacks they seem to be worried about really aren't ones where something like this is necessarily useful and can't be performed by downloading other more sophisticated applications which are designed to circumvent these kinds of security violations. I can understand their concern and I'm not a developer, but this seems like extreme Overkill and quite unnecessary. Just thought I would point out this interesting bit of information to you guys so you can come to your own conclusions.

If you're concerned about the application you can at least disable it. You will need to use ADB and if that doesn't work you can log into a shell and run one of the two commands below

ADB:

adb shell cmd package disable-user com.samsung.android.rampart

From shell:

cmd package disable-user com.samsung.android.rampart