Hacking to the Vending Machine

Whatever hacking means to you.

I found an access to the file manager in our college's vending machines.

You order a snack, go to the feedback form. Over there you rate it absolutely horrible (It's okay, the overpricing justifies it).

This then brings up the Google keyboard through which you can access the settings for it. From there, your personal dictionary, and the button to export it into a selecteable file.

The most I could do in my experiments is create directories. In my next attempt, I'd like to try writing to an .html file through the dictionary export, and opening that with the operating system's default browser.

Oh, and yes, the vending machines are running a very old version of Android. Perhaps 7.

I managed to get access to the file manager in the vending machines Need to figure out a way to write files there's .apk's in it but I couldn't find a way to execute anything And the only way to write files would be ... exporting the data from our google keyboard dictionary to a local file. We're lucky if it's a plaintext .txt, otherwise we would be stuck with ... JSON formatting We can create folders, and specify the output file. But I think the directory is limited to the keyboard's specifications. I think a certain prefix is enforced. Probably not string-based, otherwise we could just /storage/0/emulated/some/prefix/../../butwegotout Someone find the format of the dictionary backups in Gboard. I reckon the version in the vending machine is very old though. Android 7 or so. If we could ... somehow ... add a binary file to our dictionary. And, uh, save that. Into an .apk file. And somehow get that ... to run. Daym What I just said is very unfeasible because encodings matter and you can't just ... run an executable by writing binary strings into a text file ... unless ... you can ...? I gotta test this Make it 🥰👍 What I just said is very unfeasible because encodings matter and you can't just ... run an executable by writing binary strings into a text file ... unless ... you can ...? I gotta test this Do jt I won't report u 🥺🤧👍 Why would I give a fuck about being reported 🤣 I'd do this in front of the college in daylight The bottleneck is that we can't execute any .apks. We need a workaround. I do wonder if the opening of all other applications is blocked; I haven't been able to test it. I tried to look for URLs in the app - and found a lot in the open source licenses. But none of them were hyperlinked. The File Manager could very well have been a full screen pop-up - so it's impossible to infer anything from it. I'm hoping to write an .html file next time and open the web browser through that.