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 dynamic reverse engineering – an example

I've prepared a variant of the previous example that will pose us some challenges. I will show you how to overcome these challenges both statically and dynamically in order for you to be able to compare the amount of effort needed in both cases.

The rule of thumb when comparing dynamic and static approaches is that 99% of the time, dynamic approaches are just easier and should be given priority if possible (don't forget that you may not be able to get access to JTAG/SWD or other on-chip debugging protocols).

In this section, we will also learn how to break where we want, inspect memory with GDB, and all this good stuff!

The target program is located here in the folder you cloned, in the ch12 folder.

First, let's start by loading it into Ghidra and inspect it superficially. Pay attention to setting the correct architecture and base address in Ghidra's loading window (refer to the previous chapter if...