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

Analyzing firmware – introduction to Ghidra

Ghidra is an open source tool that will allow you to reverse engineer executables on a lot of different CPU architectures for free. It also gives you a very nice feature when you compare it to the most popular proprietary tool: C decompilation for free.

Its main proprietary competitor (IDA Pro) is very popular in the security community but is extremely expensive and, all in all, only has one feature that Ghidra lacks: native debugger integration (Ghidra support some level of integration with the usual debuggers with external bridges). Given the extremely high license costs involved in IDA (this can be explained, but I will not enter into this debate here), I have chosen to use Ghidra in this book for you to be able to use a modern reverse engineering software suite.

I use IDA at work and Ghidra in my free time. Both are very good but Ghidra is open source.

Getting to know Ghidra with a very simple ARM Linux executable

The...