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

Dump formats and memory images

The first thing to know about raw formats is that they are not as raw as you think. When you dump an EEPROM (SPI or I2C) or dump a chip's memory space, there is always an underlying structure. A chip cannot magically turn a soup of bytes into something it can use and run internally. To understand the structure of such an image, you will have to dig into the chip's documentation.

When analyzing a dump, the following applies:

  • There is always an underlying organization.
  • Read the chip's documentation and its underlying architecture documentation.
  • If it is a dump that is external to a device (that is, from a firmware update), then the following applies:

    - It can pack multiple updates for multiple chips.

    - It can be applied in multiple passes (update chip1, then chip2, and so on) that are necessarily reflected in the structure, but are not necessarily targeting your chip of interest.

  • If it is a dump that is internal to a...