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 Bluetooth

Many devices have Bluetooth connectivity available, from phones to headsets to input devices. Let's see what we can look at with this interface.

Bluetooth basics

Bluetooth is a radio protocol that operates between 2.4 and 2.48 GHz. It is not easy to sniff because it is transmitted by hopping on multiple frequencies pseudorandomly (depending on the address of the master device) and has several variants:

  • BT/1.x (2000), also known as the ancestor: This has not been deployed in new products for a long time. It had privacy problems since it was sending a unique ID over the air.
  • BT/2.x (2004), also known as classic Bluetooth: This has been around for years and is "kind of" kept in the hands of the big players of the market. This is the doing of Apple since, to be able to be used by iPhones, you have to send an entry ticket to them (called the MFi). It is faster than BT1 and introduces a better pairing system...