Ability to extract payload.bin

[chinyeungli]

Short Description

The current SCTK / extractcode is not able to extract the Android OTA payload.bin that contains boot image and other important partition files. It would be great that extractcode is able to handle this.

Possible Labels

• new feature
• archive extraction

Select Category

• Enhancement
• Add License/Copyright
• Scan Feature
• Packaging
• Documentation
• Expand Support
• Other

[pombredanne]

@armijnhemel ping :)

[armijnhemel]

@armijnhemel ping :)

pong.

The question that I have would be: why reinvent the wheel? All of this has already been implemented in BANG. If you wouldn't want to use BANG (which I simply cannot imagine at all) there are many parsers available for direct use if you would be willing to add the Kaitai Struct runtime as a dependency and generate the parsers for use with Python (or download them from the Kaitai Struct website).

Android has used quite a few different formats over the years, some introduced by Google and some by vendors for their factory images and OTA updates, so you would not be looking at a single extractor, but at multiple extractors. The most recent format is the Android update format, which has several versions. The current version is 2 but the specification for that (kept in a protobuf file) has also changed slightly over the years. Also note that there are also differences between full OTA images (easy to unpack) and incremental updates (not so easy to unpack).

You really first need to find out which format you are looking at, as there is no single payload.bin format.

[pombredanne]

@armijnhemel we want to reuse BANG hence why I pinged you here!