this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
7 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Android
3310 readers
1 users here now
A place to ask your questions and seek help related to your Android device and the Android ecosystem.
Whether you're looking for app recommendations, phone buying advice, or want to explore rooting and tutorials, this is the place for you!
Rules
- Be descriptive: Help us help you by providing as many details as you can.
- Be patient: You're getting free help from Internet strangers, so you may have to wait for an answer.
- Be helpful: If someone asks you for more information, tell us what you can. If someone asks you for a screenshot, please provide one!
- Be nice: Treat others with respect, even if you don't agree with their advice. Accordingly, you should expect others to be nice to you as well. Report intentionally rude answers.
- No piracy: Sharing or discussing pirated content is strictly prohibited. Do not ask others for a paid app or about how to acquire one.
- No affiliate/marketing links: Posting affiliate links is not allowed.
- No URL shorteners: These can hide the true location of the page and lead people to malicious places.
- No lockscreen bypasses: Please do not comment, link, or assist with bypassing lock screens or factory reset protection.
- No cross-posting: Please take the time to make a proper post instead of cross-posting.
Other Communities
- !android@lemdro.id
- !androidmemes@lemdro.id
- !google@lemdro.id
- !googlepixel@lemdro.id
- !xiaomi@lemdro.id
- !sony@lemdro.id
- !samsung@lemdro.id
- !galaxywatch@lemdro.id
- !oneplus@lemdro.id
- !motorola@lemdro.id
- !meta@lemdro.id
- !apple@lemdro.id
- !microsoft@lemdro.id
- !chatgpt@lemdro.id
- !bing@lemdro.id
- !reddit@lemdro.id
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Shizuku runs locally on your Android device on which you want to do debugging or perform automated tasks. It's just using the ADB wireless interface to gain access to these functions. I.e. your Android device 'thinks' it's connected via wifi to a remote device which does the debugging.
Fair enough, thanks.
I know it's the app itself that executes adb commands. I just wonder.
https://shizuku.rikka.app/guide/setup/
It says, allow debugging on this network.
So what you're saying is, this is somewhat misleading, for this step doesn't automaticallh grant all devices on the network debug-privileges; and were the modem itself, somehow, applying for them, then it wouldn't have asked for the code as Shizuku is doing, via a notification?
Hope this helps!
Perhaps my question had semiconsciously stemmed from this:
Why would Android ask me to authorize a whole network for wireless debugging, if it then proceeds to demand device-permissions anyway?
I understand it is just a second layer of security, or, a relic of times when wifi connections were unencrypted. But if so, then wireless debugging should be just unenablable if elsewhere in Android settings, insecure wifi networks are enabled / if you presently are on one.
(Is adb encrypted anyway, as a protocol itself? If I authorized, say, my laptop, wirelessly, would the modem be able to read my commands? Those aren't questions for you, btw, just musings. I should probably hit ai / Github for those.)
Ah, sorry, seems like I was wrong on the whole "no network connection needed", but the reason is the explanation for your question!
The only way for your phone to recognize/authenticate the source of an incoming ADB connection is the MAC address. Basically every device that sends/receives ethernet packets has to have a unique "fingerprint", so everyone knows it's still the same device if it disconnects & reconnects etc. Everything else (IP address etc.) can change at any time, so the MAC address is the only fingerprint available.
But devices can spoof (change) their MAC address. That's a really useful feature in many cases, e.g. phones these days use a random MAC for every new network, so a network provider can't track you moving through multiple different networks. Also there's no way to prevent it with our current network design. But this means that a malicious actor could wait for your trusted device to disconnect, then change their MAC to the one from your trusted device, and thus send malicious ADB commands.
Androids solution is to make you trust both the network and the device. So as long as you don't have malicious actors in your trusted network, you're safe - even if you connect to a different network with malicious actors, they can't send ADB commands.
I see, makes sense. Thanks.
Hm, so, even if it is true that Shizuku-pairing directly privileges only the phone itself -- that the adb commands never leave the phone -- it follows that a malicious wifi modem, knowing all devices' mac addresses, could, perhaps, feign being the phone, mac-wise. And issue its own commands, which the phone wouldn't tell aren't its own.
Unless adb privileges are also identified by the ip address of origin. Unless, the modem could also feign those and multicast them, or something. Could it?
Oh well. This is straying quite far from Android. Thank you regardless.
In any case, I just wish Android provided networkless self-debugging. On one hand, I oughtn't complain, for I deliberately didn't root my phone; but on another, I'd like to have a secure "halfroot" of adb at hand.
(Maybe root operations / grantings should have a pending time of 24 hours. Just to make sure the user / I have thought them through. And yes, I know root shall be able to erase that mechanism. The weakest part of all my setups is myself.)
I just tested some scenarios:
So you're safe as long as you don't start Shizuku & trust the network while connected to a potentially malicious network.
I agree 100%! It's definitely possible to add a better API that would allow Android users to trust specific apps with ADB debugging connections. Unfortunately Google is hell-bent on restricting the platform instead of opening it up :(
That is a lovely analysis for this lowly thread of mine. Thanks again.
Thing is, I don't trust my modem. Just on principle. It's nonlibre software.
I'll reread your posts in a while.
Right. The very thing I want adb for is, among other things, to install apps which Google arbitrarily declared obsolete (the api version declaration, I believe it is). I believe many good apps on F-Droid are uninstallable because of that. "This app is incompatible with your device" -- no, you declared that it is.
And sadly -- though that doesn't seem to be Google's fault -- it still doesn't seem possible to compile Android apps on Android, so I can't just get sources, change the manifest, and recompile them and install them myself, to escape that.
But that's for another thread.