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

Closing words

I hope you had a lot of pleasure reading this book and that I've been able to get you started on the path of messing with electronics and embedded systems. I think I can never repeat this enough, but persistence and repetition are the key to learning hardware hacking; it is a craft. You will burn yourself, cut yourself, burn components and tools, and other not-so-agreeable moments will happen. You will be stuck at 3 A.M. hunting for bugs in your code or looking for a vulnerability that may not really exist. The key thing is... don't let that stop you. Like anything hacking- or making-related, persistence and courage are actually what will allow you to succeed. A big part of this job is staying up to date on current research: keep reading articles (new ones, old ones... read all the things!), follow security conferences, read Hackaday, Y Combinator, participate in Capture the Flags (CTFs), follow trainings (on a side note, having a serious training budget must...