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 11

  1. For example:

    Mach-O: MacOS and iOS

    a.out: Simplifier gcc output

    COFF: Older Unix executable format

    PEF: PowerPC BE/OS and MacOS classic

    There are plenty!

  2. .text: Usually the section that holds the executable instructions.debug: Usually holds the debugging symbols.plt,.dynamic,.got: Sections that hold the necessary information for the linker to solve the external symbols (functions and data that come from external libraries). Reading about the linking mechanism in elf is a very good idea!
  3. SPI1
  4. Let's start with the strange string. When you look into how strings are stored in memory, you think of them as a list of characters, one after the other, in the order of growing memory addresses. This seems logical since you access them by incrementing a pointer. The thing is that the endianness (the direction a CPU stores numbers in its registers) can actually matter. What if I told you to break the string into blocks of four characters and read them in reverse?
     &quot...