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

Security properties – what do we expect?

We are now going to look into an embedded system. But what do we want to find in there? What do we want to test and why do we want to verify that it is done properly?

Not every system will require each of these functions (communication, maintenance, self-test, and so on), but these functions should at least have been considered by the client in their security requirements. From there, either the security properties are integrated as risk mitigation or the linked risk has been formally accepted within their risk management process – that is, if these risk management steps were followed in the product design.

Very often, these steps (establishing formal security requirements and integrating the unfulfilled mitigations in the risk management process) are overlooked. This is bad for the product, but this is very common. These are two findings for your report right here!

Now, let's look at the usual functions of a system...