Book Image

Practical Hardware Pentesting

By : Jean-Georges Valle
Book Image

Practical Hardware Pentesting

By: Jean-Georges Valle

Overview of this book

If you’re looking for hands-on introduction to pentesting that delivers, then Practical Hardware Pentesting is for you. This book will help you plan attacks, hack your embedded devices, and secure the hardware infrastructure. Throughout the book, you will see how a specific device works, explore the functional and security aspects, and learn how a system senses and communicates with the outside world. You’ll set up a lab from scratch and then gradually work towards an advanced hardware lab—but you’ll still be able to follow along with a basic setup. As you progress, you’ll get to grips with the global architecture of an embedded system and sniff on-board traffic, learn how to identify and formalize threats to the embedded system, and understand its relationship with its ecosystem. You’ll discover how to analyze your hardware and locate its possible system vulnerabilities before going on to explore firmware dumping, analysis, and exploitation. The reverse engineering chapter will get you thinking from an attacker point of view; you’ll understand how devices are attacked, how they are compromised, and how you can harden a device against the most common hardware attack vectors. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with security best practices and understand how they can be implemented to secure your hardware.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting to Know the Hardware
6
Section 2: Attacking the Hardware
12
Section 3: Attacking the Software

Basics of networking

Networking relies on a few basic concepts:

  • Encapsulation: Just like a matryoshka doll, network packets behave like a box in a box in a box in a... you get the point. The OSI model describes the seven classics layers of encapsulation that are potentially present in all communications. For example, it is possible to change the physical layer of a packer without impacting the upper layer (that is what happens when you send an ethernet frame over Wi-Fi, for example).
  • Routing: Routing allows a packet to reach its destination without the sender knowing exactly how to get to it or the destination knowing exactly how to send the response to the sender. This boils down, in a very oversimplified fashion, to each machine knowing how to reach a given number of networks (or groups of networks) and having a machine to give packets to when it doesn't know how to reach the destination network.
  • Connection: A connection is a logical link that's established...