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

Chapter 6

  1. The symbol time seems to be 8.8 microseconds, which is very probably 115,200 bauds.
  2. Quad SPI. This is a variant of SPI where there are four data lines in order to speed up transfer. This is very common for flash storage.
  3. It is used to detect errors.
  4. Phillips.
  5. The 24LC has address pins that can be used to set the address on the hardware level.
  6. You can bit-bang the I2C protocol (it is a bit complicated but examples can be found) to accept any address on the slave side.
  7. "I love binary operators !": ^ is the notation for the XOR operation (bit per bit, a^b = 1 if a!=b, 0 if a=b). This mean that if you take a string byte by byte and XOR it with a key (also byte by byte), the message is (badly) hidden. Here, it is "I love binary operators!" ^ "A very very serious key!". This is a very common method to make reverse engineering a little bit more complicated since it hides printable characters.