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

Finding the data

Before parsing the data, we have to find it. In addition to classical storage media (hard drives, Solid State Drive (SSDs), onboard USB storage, and more), embedded systems use more specific chips and systems to store data, and some of them are listed as follows:

  • EEPROMs
  • EMMC and NAND/NOR Flash
  • Static RAM, and so on...

Let's look at each of them in the following sections.

EEPROMs

EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) and flash memory are "one-chip" storage solutions that keep the data even when the power is off. They are available on pretty much every existing protocol (I2C, (Q)SPI, 1-Wire, and more). Locating these chips is not always easy (especially if they are unmarked or rebranded) but (as already discussed in the component identification section in the previous chapter), it is possible to identify them by elimination or by sniffing the protocol on the board. Typically, the storage capacity is...