Book Image

IoT Penetration Testing Cookbook

Book Image

IoT Penetration Testing Cookbook

Overview of this book

IoT is an upcoming trend in the IT industry today; there are a lot of IoT devices on the market, but there is a minimal understanding of how to safeguard them. If you are a security enthusiast or pentester, this book will help you understand how to exploit and secure IoT devices. This book follows a recipe-based approach, giving you practical experience in securing upcoming smart devices. It starts with practical recipes on how to analyze IoT device architectures and identify vulnerabilities. Then, it focuses on enhancing your pentesting skill set, teaching you how to exploit a vulnerable IoT device, along with identifying vulnerabilities in IoT device firmware. Next, this book teaches you how to secure embedded devices and exploit smart devices with hardware techniques. Moving forward, this book reveals advanced hardware pentesting techniques, along with software-defined, radio-based IoT pentesting with Zigbee and Z-Wave. Finally, this book also covers how to use new and unique pentesting techniques for different IoT devices, along with smart devices connected to the cloud. By the end of this book, you will have a fair understanding of how to use different pentesting techniques to exploit and secure various IoT devices.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Defining firmware analysis methodology


Firmware is the center of controlling IoT devices, which is why we may want to start analyzing its contents before other pieces of the device's components. Depending on the industry your IoT device is manufactured for, obtaining a firmware image and disassembling its contents may be trivial. Similarly, some industry verticals require certain safeguards that may make reverse engineering more difficult and/or time-consuming. Nevertheless, there are common patterns we will look for when analyzing firmware. Usually, the most common goals of an assessor will be to locate the following:

  • Passwords
  • API tokens
  • API endpoints (URLs)
  • Vulnerable services
  • Backdoor accounts
  • Configuration files
  • Source code
  • Private keys
  • How data is stored

Throughout the following recipes, we will have the same goals when analyzing firmware. This recipe will show you the overview methodology of firmware analysis and reverse engineering.

The following is a list of the basic methodologies for analyzing...