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

Introduction to the bluepill board

A board to do what? What is the board? What can it do? How much does it cost? Why this one? Where is the documentation? Yes, you surely have plenty of questions! You will sometimes need a reminder while testing or doing the exercises, so I will also point to the chip's documentation. These questions are exactly what we are going to be talking about in the following sub-headings.

A board to do what?

Well, we will need to interface the board with the circuit we will want to attack. Since a general-usage PC doesn't really have a readily accessible interface board to connect with the most common protocols, we will use a bluepill to do so.

What is it?

The bluepill is a colloquial name for many different boards that have the following characteristics:

  • Are cheaply available on bidding or Chinese goods sites such as eBay, Taobao, and AliExpress (in the €1.5 range at the time of writing this book)
  • Host an STM32F103C8T6...