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

Networking in embedded systems using Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is a well-known radio network that is used by a lot of embedded systems. We will learn how to intercept traffic by mounting our own access point and listening and changing the traffic that goes through it. The methodology we will use is common to most Wi-Fi traffic analysis (phone apps, connected devices, and so on).

Selecting Wi-Fi hardware

Just like for Wi-Fi attacks, not every Wi-Fi chipset is capable of doing everything we need. Depending on your device requirements, it is possible that you may have to buy some specific hardware:

  • Check that your hardware is compatible with the Wi-Fi band used by your device (a/b/g/n).
  • Check that your device supports injection: https://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=compatible_cards.
  • Check that your hardware driver supports Access Point (AP) mode. You can check if the following command outputs something:
    $sudo iw list|sed -n -r '/ace modes/,/^\t[^\t]/p'

    If the output...