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

Identifying modulations – a didactic example

What we now have is a very common question when looking into unknown signals: what is the modulation? Finding the correct modulation and parameters can require a bit of detective work, even if you know the parameters. This section is more of an illustration of the process of reversing a signal modulation than directly a recipe (since there is no recipe). Some people are currently working in an academic context on projects to train neural networks to do signal classification, meaning there is no straightforward way to recognize modulations.

In the case of the light controller, we can already reduce the candidate's number because we know (from the FCC documentation and opening the device) that it embeds a CC2500. The datasheet tells us that it supports a few modulation schemes: 2-FSK, GFSK, MSK, and OOK. We already eliminated two (OOK and FSK) but how do we tell the difference between them?

First, let's talk about what...