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

What about now? Self-teaching and your first project

This is all nice; you read through this whole book, played with a Furby, have a few bluepills on your desk, as well as a JTAG adapter and a logic analyzer, but... now what?

Like I said before, this is as much a craft as it is a science... so, well, you have to practice! Practice and practice again!

Here is a list of things you can play with for cheap:

  • Old routers, modems, and telecom equipment in general: They are super easy to find discarded in an office corner or at a flea market. They usually run some kind of embedded operating system and you may find some things you are not used to (VxWorks, Windows CE, Symbian, and so on) and "weird" architectures (8086, Z80, 68k, PPC, MIPS, and so on).
  • Old toys: If you destroy an old toy that you bought for €1 at your local flea market, you won't care! This means that you will actually learn a lot. Even when destroying it you will learn (of course, you...