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

Extracting the data

For cases where we don't have the data already (that is, we did not succeed in getting updates), we need to extract the data from its storage place to our computer. Being able to process and modify the data on a computer will allow us to use higher-level programming languages and tools.

Let's have a look at the most common things we have to extract.

On-chip firmware

Most micro-controllers will embed their programs (that is, their firmware), at least partially, on on-chip (or on-module) flash or other forms of storage, such as EEPROM. The worst-case scenario for us is cases where programs are stored in One-Time Programmable (OTP) memory, such as the MCU used in the Furby toy (in a masked ROM) or a lot of very cheap MCUs.

For example, most ARM chips come with on-chip flash. The ESP family of chips has a flash storage chip on the module from where the chip retrieves its program. These can usually store long-term variables (across reboots). It...