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 storage block

Storage blocks are components (or groups of components) used to store information. Two storage blocks are always present, the RAM (for lower-end MCUs, it is usually in the CPU chip itself and for higher-end MCUs, it is outside of the chip) and the program storage. Some optional additional long-term storage can be present (usually as flash memory on modern systems, but it can vary from spinning hard drives, EEPROMs, to diode matrix ROMs on older systems).

RAM

RAM is very fast, tightly CPU-coupled (and usually more expensive) memory. This is where the CPU usually fetches its instructions from, stores the short-term results of its operations (they are then stored for the long term in a slower and cheaper storage medium such as flash), and so on. The main characteristics of RAM in current systems are as follows:

  • Very fast compared to long-term storage (for example, EEPROM, flash, or a hard drive)
  • Much more expensive compared to long-term storage (for...