In light of all the CarrierIQ press I started wondering what others applications on my phone might be doing things that I am not aware of. So I installed SQLite Editor and started poking around my phone, that’s when I decided to see what my sms client “Handcent” was up too. Since I wanted to view my out on a bigger monitor I fired up a adb shell and used SQLite see what Handcent sms was hiding under the hood.

I used the following command to search my /data/data folder on my device to look for any files with a .db extension since that indicated it was a database file.

adb shell find /data -name *.db

As you can see I found several databases on my phone but today
we will be looking at one in particular. Handcent's "hc_sms.db".

For this part we will use sqlite to view the database layout (schema)
and its contents:

sqlite> .schema
CREATE TABLE DELIVERY_REPORT (MESSAGE_ID INTEGER Primary KEY,TIMESTAMP text,UPDATE_TIMESTAMP text);

CREATE TABLE SEND_LOG (ID Integer Primary KEY,SID INTEGER ,SEND_TYPE INTEGER,BEGIN_SEND_TIME text,END_SEND_TIME text,SEND_CONTENT TEXT,
SENDING_PERSON_NUBER INTEGER,SUCCESS_NUMBER INTEGER,FAIL_NUMBER INTEGER);

CREATE TABLE SEND_LOG_DETAIL (SID INTEGER,PID INTEGER,BEGIN_SEND_TIME TEXT,END_SEND_TIME TEXT,PERSON_NAME TEXT,PERSON_NUMBER TEXT,SENDI
NG_MESSAGE_NUMBER INTEGER,SENT_SUCCESS_NUMBER INTEGER,SENT_FAIL_NUMBER INTEGER);
CREATE TABLE android_metadata (locale TEXT);

sqlite> .tables
DELIVERY_REPORT   SEND_LOG          SEND_LOG_DETAIL   android_metadata
sqlite>

And now after doing a select * from SEND_LOG; to my amazement
I saw all my text messages that were sent since I installed
the handcent application both DELETED and undeleted.


Also looking at select * from SEND_LOG_DETAIL I saw the same
information but this log also held the receiver of the sms name
and phone number.

Now my question is, if I am deleting a message and thinking
its being deleted why would handcent chose to keep a copy of
this message in an unencrypted database where anyone can access
it? I would love to hear from them and try to understand why
this is being done.