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

Introduction to arbitrary radio/SDR

SDR allows you to receive (and emit if you have the adequate license and hardware) arbitrary radio signals. The adapter acts as a device that can sample (some can also emit) radio signals around a frequency you can specify and that is it. All the signal processing is done on the software. The theoretical aspects of the sampling and how the samples represent the radio data is a little complicated; it is not absolutely necessary to understand it to start but it will become very useful later when you start to develop your own scripts and signal processing chains in GNU Radio.

Note

To understand the theoretical principles of SDR and basic usage of GNU Radio, I strongly advise looking at this excellent series of videos by Michael Ossman: https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/1/.