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

Understanding D1W

D1W is a one-wire bus. It is usually used for simple sensors (temperature or humidity) and has "buttons" that just show a unique identifier. This is an interesting bus where the power of the device can also come from the wire that is used to transmit data. This is usually not supported by hardware peripherals in MCUs; you need to bit-bang the protocol. Bit-banging a protocol means that we will implement the protocol manually by using the GPIOs of the blue pill. 1-Wire is an open-drain bus (like I2C or UART) and hence needs an external pullup resistor (usually of 5k ohms) to set the voltage to a known state when the MCU disconnects the pin (also called floating as in the code).

Mode of operation

The communication on the D1W is time-based and is initialized by sending a reset pulse that the slave will answer to (the presence pulse).

The reset pulse

The reset pulse is initialized by the master pulling low the data line for at least 480 µS.

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