Book Image

Practical Hardware Pentesting, Second edition - Second Edition

By : Jean-Georges Valle
Book Image

Practical Hardware Pentesting, Second edition - Second Edition

By: Jean-Georges Valle

Overview of this book

Practical Hardware Pentesting, Second Edition, is an example-driven guide that will help you plan attacks, hack your embedded devices, and secure the hardware infrastructure. Throughout the book, you’ll explore the functional and security aspects of a device and learn how a system senses and communicates with the outside world. You’ll set up a lab from scratch and gradually work towards an advanced hardware lab. The first part of this book will get you attacking the software of an embedded device. This will get you thinking from an attacker point of view; you’ll understand how devices are attacked, compromised, and how you can harden a device against the most common hardware attack vectors. 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. This 2nd Edition covers real-world examples featuring various devices like smart TVs, baby monitors, or pacemakers, you’ll discover how to analyze hardware and locate its possible vulnerabilities before going on to explore firmware dumping, analysis, and exploitation. By the end of this book, you’ll and understand how to implement best practices to secure your hardware.
Table of Contents (5 chapters)

Why C and not Arduino?

The C programming language has a reputation for being hard to use and complex. Trust me, it is not. This reputation comes from the fact it doesn't come with a lot of the convenience functions of more modern languages. The simplicity that comes with this language makes it shine when the resources are constrained and when the execution needs to be really efficient, like on a microcontroller!

While I am quite sure that most of the examples in the book could be written using the Arduino IDE and API, it would do the following:

  • Hide too much of the compilation chain and the programming process from you
  • Prevent you from actually understanding the capabilities of the chip
  • Make it difficult for you to actually know what is happening on the chip (since it uses some of the chip capabilities to provide you with convenience functions)
  • Actually consume quite a bit of storage space to provide you with these convenience functions

All of this (unless you actually have a degree...