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

Using OpenOCD

Open On-Chip Debugger (OpenOCD), is a piece of software that acts as a bridge between your debugger interface and the JTAG interface. On one side, it will drive your JTAG interface and on the other side, present a standard GDB server that the debugger will use to drive it.

It will translate the debugger command I want to read a 32-bit value at address X to a series of zeros and ones your JTAG interface will clock to TDI. The interface gets the answer on TDO and sends it to OpenOCD, which translates it to an answer to GDB, the value at X is Y.

As much as the GDB server side is well established and standardized, OpenOCD needs to be able to talk correctly to your adapter and generate the correct series of zeros and ones for your target CPU/MCU. For this, OpenOCD will need the correct configuration. This is done in a series of configuration statements in TCL (http://openocd.org/doc/html/Tcl-Crash-Course.html).

OpenOCD configuration files are not simply variable affectation...