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

Common problems and their mitigations

Here are some key problems that are really common and some indications on how to solve them.

Establishing a trust relationship between the backend and a device

Here, the main problem is how to establish a trust relationship between a device in the field and the management infrastructure. In order to tackle this problem, a few elements have to be understood, not only about the device itself but also about its fabrication and enrollment process.

The main challenge in the usual situation is that the vendor will want to reduce the actions toward an individual device as much as possible in order to keep the manufacturing costs as low as possible, keep the hardware cost as low as possible, but still get the highest possible level of assurance for their money.

The questions you have to ask for the device are as follows:

  • Is the MCU capable of reasonable cryptographic operations (that is, SSL/TLS)?
  • Does the MCU have a secure enclave...