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 toolchain

We will use a set of tools to transform a high-level language (yes, I wrote that, C is a high-level language) into the binary code that the chip understands and is laid out in a file that it can execute. To make it short, it's called compilation (compilation is actually one step of it, but it is a quite easy shorthand). We will push this file to the chip and have it run our code. In order to do that, we will have to use a set of tools and I will describe these in the following sections.

The compilation process

Under the generic compilation concept, the way it is understood by most people, we turn the code into something that can be executed by a computer. From the push of a button or a sternly typed command line, we see a file appear that we can run (a .exe file, a .elf file, or other formats). In reality, this is (of course) a little bit more complicated.

The compilation in itself

The goal of the compilation process is to turn a human-readable language...