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

Questions

  1. We looked into ELF and PE as executable formats. Can you give me two more formats? What are they used for?
  2. In an ELF file, what are these sections: .text, .debug, .plt, .dynamic, and.got?
  3. What peripheral is at 0x40013000 on the bluepill?
  4. We didn't really look into the Decipher_flag function. Its first argument is a very random-looking array and its second argument is this very strange string: NACAH IET Z ? A. With all of the shifting and XORing, this is most probably a cyphering function. What algorithm is that?
  5. Other clues regarding the Decipher_flag should be in there but aren't. What clues and why?
  6. In the first reverse engineering exercise (re1.bin), instead of reversing the password validation string, we could just have patched the binary to accept an incorrect password and flashed the patched version on the bluepill. How? What is the offset of the instruction to patch? Patch it with what tool? With what instruction?