Well that didn’t take long. The team over at GTVHacker have worked their magic on Chromecast. The HDMI dongle revealed by Google last week was so prominent they had to cancel their 3-free-months of Netflix perk. We believe the thing is worth $35 without it, particularly if we end up seeing some incredible hacks from the community.
So far this is just getting your foot in the door by rooting the device. In addition to walking with the exploit the wiki instructions give us a great deal more photos of the internals than we saw from the teardown in yesterday’s links post. There’s an unpopulated pad with seventeen connections on the PCB. You can patch into the serial connections this way, running at a 115200 8n1. however you won’t have terminal gain access to out of the box. The exploit utilizes a vulnerability in the bootloader to flash a hacked system folder which provides root. After wiping the cache it reboots like typical however now you can gain access to a root shell on port 23.