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

The CPU block

The CPU's goal is to process information. This is the core of the system and is your ultimate target in a penetration test. In the vast majority of cases, the CPUs you will be testing will have a von Neumann architecture (that is, the bus for data and instructions is shared) and rarely a Harvard architecture (a separate bus for data and instructions). From a penetration testing point of view, Harvard architectures are less exposed to buffer overflows since these buffers typically contain data that cannot usually be executed.

CPU roles

The CPU itself will perform the following activities:

  • Executing the different arithmetic and logic instructions, such as addition, multiplication, subtraction, division, and so on
  • Reading and writing memory
  • Managing the different hardware peripherals that are integrated with it, such as UART, SPI, cryptographic peripherals, storage peripherals, and so on
  • Reacting to interrupts from, and communicating with...