the exploits appear to be open source. they are made by human beings who can be talked with. 

mediatek chips are apparently arm. the author of mtkclient has an exploitation playground repository at https://github.com/bkerler/exploit_me . i'm not sure what it is, but maybe a vulnerable binary so that people can learn how to build exploits to phones by reading their firmware? I'm actually not sure.

the most prominent exploit for these devices is called kamakiri, the source code for which is at https://github.com/amonet-kamakiri/kamakiri . I don't know whether it's relevent for my phone or not.

bkerler's mediatek client at https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient has a number of additional command codes in it, many copied from the work of preceding developers, showing how to do useful things like reading and writing ram and emmc without the download agent (I think, not certain). this developer also has a qualcomm client they have made.

i'd like to try to figure out what kamakiri does, and basically if any of these exploits are relevent for my phone. ideally i'd like to learn what is necessary or if it is possible to lock down my phone to prevent mutation of it or of firmware dumps I download from it.