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 10: Accessing the Debug Interfaces

Most microcontrollers (MCUs) come with some sort of debugging/programming interface. The standard interface is called JTAG (Joint Test Action Group). It is an industry standard and is usually present in chips with a pin count high enough to support it. Serial Wire Debug (SWD) is a derivative of JTAG for lower-count chips. Some vendors also have their own variants (DebugWIRE for Atmels, Spy-Bi-Wire (serialized JTAG) on TI's MSP430s, PICs ICSP, and others). Now how do we find them, access them, and use them? This is what we will discuss in this chapter.

In this chapter, we will first cover the JTAG protocol and then learn how to find the JTAG pins. We will then learn how to install and use OpenOCD. Toward the end of the chapter, we will also cover some practical use cases.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What is JTAG used for?
  • The JTAG protocol
  • Finding JTAG pins/test points
  • ARM JTAG –...