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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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I don't know of any project to do this, but it's an interesting idea.
For most/all phones, you would need to break the phone's software security to boot another OS. To boot via USB the phone's firmware would need to support that, or a sufficient USB vulnerability could be used to take over a running system and boot into a new OS. This would almost certainly be unreliable and only work on specific devices.
Note that if part of your goal is to extract data from the phone, only old phones store data unencrypted these days. One advantage of using a vulnerability to hijack the current os would be the availability of the keys to decrypt the phone's storage if the storage is already unlocked.
Although it's not as interesting, you certainly can load firmware on an android device that will boot from USB. Not sure if this already exists or would need to be built.