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

Debugging/programming protocols – What are they and what are they used for?

The in-circuit debugging protocols have legitimate usages that we can use and abuse for our tests. First, let's see how they are supposed to be used.

Legitimate usage

The debug protocols are used to achieve multiple goals and some are listed here:

  • Test the physical soldering of the boards (this was the initial goal of JTAG).
  • Program the chips in development or production.
  • Help in debugging the programs during development.

Since the board will have the main micro-controller interact with the chips that are on the circuit board, it can be hard to develop in a completely simulated environment. This is because, unlike a general-purpose computer, there is almost no commonality between two different boards (a general-purpose computer has an OS and this OS provides a good layer of hardware abstraction).

Using JTAG to attack a system

The test subsystem is a very interesting...