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)

Gaining insight into Z-Wave


Z-Wave is one of the popular protocols in wireless sensor networks and home automation, and operates on 908.42 MHz in US and 868.42 MHz in Europe. Z-Wave just like ZigBee supports mesh networking, which makes it secure against issues such as node failure.

It has been developed by Sigma Systems, which makes it a closed protocol compared to ZigBee and others. This is also one of the reasons that the security research initiative by the security community against Z-Wave is relatively less compared to other popular IoT protocols. There are also projects such as OpenZWave to provide an open source alternative; however, they are still in the very early stages.

Just like typical radio communication protocols, Z-Wave devices suffer from the same set of security issues. One of the most common vulnerabilities in Z-Wave devices is the lack of encryption in communication, which makes it vulnerable to attacks such as sensitive information transmission in clear text and replay...