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

Summary

In this chapter, we saw the different media that can be used in embedded systems and the tools we need to approach them, extract them, understand their structures, and modify them. Since the ways to store data are very variable from one system to another, it is not possible to go through every possible variation but, after reading this chapter, you will know (at least partially) the possible tools that you can use, how things are generally organized, and some concepts you could think about when reverse-engineering storage schemes. These tools are very powerful but, like any tool, are limited by the skill of the person that uses them. That's why you should practice and read the documentation of the tools as much as possible.

In the next chapter, we will look into how to modify the stored elements and, from the changes in the system behavior, better understand the structure of the stored data.