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 unknown storage structures

More often than not, light systems (those not embedding a full-fledged OS such as Linux) will have a pretty well-documented way of storing their firmware internally (since this storage form is crucial for the target MCU to function properly, it is well described in the target MCU datasheet). On the other hand, the way the data is stored by the firmware itself is very much left to the firmware developer device.

Unknown storage formats

There is no definitive way to reverse engineer the way data is stored, as for most reverse engineering, it is as much an art as it is a science. The only way to get a good knack for it is, just like soldering, doing it again and again, but having spent a fair share of my time reversing a lot of different things, such as network protocols, storage structures, and more, I can give you some pointers.

Understanding the way the data is organized for storage depends on multiple factors. There are some general...