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)

The toolchain

We will use a set of tools to transform a high-level language (yes, I wrote that, C is a high-level language) into the binary code that the chip understands and is laid out in a file that it can execute. To make it short, it's called compilation (compilation is actually one step of it, but it is a quite easy shorthand). We will push this file to the chip and have it run our code. In order to do that, we will have to use a set of tools and I will describe these in the following sections.

The compilation process

Under the generic compilation concept, the way it is understood by most people, we turn the code into something that can be executed by a computer. From the push of a button or a sternly typed command line, we see a file appear that we can run (a .exe file, a .elf file, or other formats). In reality, this is (of course) a little bit more complicated.

The compilation in itself

The goal of the compilation process is to turn a human-readable language (C, C++, assembly...