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 actuator blocks

The actuators actually act on the world (these are the things that actually do things that can be perceived by humans as "the things the system does," such as triggering heating, moving, and so on). These are your servos, your motors, your power transistors, and so on.

From a penetration testing point of view, interacting with the actuators can help you with:

  • Collecting data that allows you to understand how the system works. Sometimes the data itself can be interesting in a creative way to exfiltrate internal states from the system (think about the original iPod 4G firmware extraction by Nils "nilss" Schneider where he extracted the boot loader via a piezo bleeping – how cool is that?!).
  • Some actuators have a feedback mechanism (for example, a linked position sensing system). These sensors' presence may not be self-evident when looking at the sensor-related chips and interfaces on the circuit board.
  • Since the actuator...