[Gllug] Phone unlocking

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 03:48:24PM +0100, Ashley Evans wrote:
> With it being so hot in the office I have not got too much of an 
> inclination to do "real" work atm so I decided to start a 
> mini-investigation.  No conclusions so far and I'm waiting for Orange 
> (notorious "lockers") to get back to me, preferably with the algorithm 
> itself, however, this is unlikly. As I spoke with a gentleman in the 
> Press Office there is a 99.9% chance that I won't be called back :)
> 
> I orginally contacted various Nokia telephone numbers abut this but was 
> informed that the locking is added to the phone (firmware, I presume) by 
> the network operators themselves. Not sure if this really is the case.
> 
> Maybe my first question should be "Does, fundementally, this algorithm 
> require you credit card number?"

Indeed it does not!

Phone unlocked, using a dodgy bit of Windows code running nicely in a
sandboxed Wine environment.

Dodgy code from here[1]:

http://www.unlockme.co.uk/dct4free.html

Safe Wine sandbox left to your ingenuity.

I even found the source code to the algorithm used (in Pascal :-!
Windows programmers, please use a Real Language!)  The source tells me
that phone locking is just security-through-obscurity.  In fact, all
was revealed when someone nicked the source code and executable from
an "authorized" unlocker!

Rich.

[1] When you run the above-mentioned bit of code, in a really bizarre
bit of Windowsism, it writes an executable called C:\Calc.exe into the
Wine sandbox.  This is actually a command-line program which takes
IMEI and network number, in that order, and prints out the codes
required, so cut the crappy & borked user interface and just use that.

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