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

Chapter 9: Software-Defined Radio Attacks

Modern embedded devices communicate a lot over radio interfaces in order to be independent of cables. It is very common for them to use the well-established protocols (such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) that we already looked into in previous chapters. There are numerous systems that don't need such complex protocols (or are constrained due to other design considerations, such as cost, complexity, processing power, and more) but still have a need for radio communications. In this case, they tend to use other protocols that are not necessarily easy to interface with out of the box. In this case, we need to be able to interact with these custom protocols in order to be able to test the communication's security. This is the domain of Software-Defined Radio (SDR).

We will go over the following topics in this chapter:

  • Introduction to arbitrary radio/SDR
  • Understanding and selecting the hardware
  • Looking into the radio spectrum...