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

Starting the system diagram

The system diagram will be one of the main documents we will use to identify the various components and subsystems. I will be using LibreOffice Draw to do this (it's free and you can use it too if you so wish), but you can use whatever diagram software you like or even a whiteboard or pen and paper – it doesn't really matter.

In this schema, I have the seven blocks that were presented in Chapter 1, Setting Up Your Pentesting Lab and Ensuring Lab Safety (Power, Networking, Storage, CPU, Sensor, Actuator, and Interface).

You will be able to find a template and multiple versions in the repository for this book.

Before you get started, establish a convention for yourself. My personal convention is as follows:

  • Empty rectangles for blocks.
  • Ovals for components, with the background color indicating the level of confidence I have in the information.
  • Arrows for buses or data paths.
  • Lines for power control or analog connections...