Practical Hardware Pentesting

Learn how to pentest your hardware with the most common attract techniques and patterns

Key Features

• Explore various pentesting tools and techniques to secure your hardware infrastructure
• Protect your hardware by finding potential entry points like glitches
• Find the best practices for securely designing your products

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Perform an embedded system test and identify security critical functionalities
• Locate critical security components and buses and learn how to attack them Discover how to dump and modify stored information
• Understand and exploit the relationship between the firmware and hardware
• Identify and attack the security functions supported by the functional blocks of the device
• Develop an attack lab to support advanced device analysis and attacks

Who this book is for

If you’re a researcher or a security professional who wants a comprehensive introduction into hardware security assessment, then this book is for you. Electrical engineers who want to understand the vulnerabilities of their devices and design them with security in mind will also find this book useful. You won’t need any prior knowledge with hardware pentensting before you get started; everything you need is in the chapters.

Table of Contents

1. Setting Up Your Pentesting Lab and Ensuring Lab Safety
2. Understanding Your Target
3. Identifying the Components of Your Target
4. Approaching and Planning the Test
5. Our Main Attack Platform
6. Sniffing and Attacking the Most Common Protocols
7. Extracting and Manipulating Onboard Storage
8. Attacking Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and BLE
9. Software-Defined Radio Attacks
10. Accessing the Debug Interfaces
11. Static Reverse Engineering and Analysis
12. Dynamic Reverse Engineering
13. Scoring and Reporting Your Vulnerabilities
14. Wrapping It Up – Mitigations and Good Practices

Review

“Practical Hardware Pentesting is a comprehensive resource for those looking to discover the world of hardware hacking. It’s not only a book – it’s a collection of knowledge, scripts, and videos that will guide you through many of the common hardware hacking techniques and processes. By following along with Jean-Georges, you’ll be exploring and exploiting hardware in no time.” –Joe Grand aka Kingpin, Hardware Hacker, Computer Engineer, and Member of L0pht Heavy Industries

About the Author

Jean-Georges Valle is a hardware penetration tester based in Belgium. His background was in software security, with hardware being a hobby, and he then started to look into the security aspects of hardware. He has spent the last decade testing various systems, from industrial logic controllers to city-scale IoT, and from media distribution to power metering. He has learned to attack embedded systems and to leverage them against cloudscale infrastructure. He is the lead hardware technical expert in an offensive security team of a big four company. Jean-Georges holds a master’s degree in information security and focuses on security at the point of intersection with hardware and software, hardware and software interaction, exploit development in embedded systems, and open source hardware.