Practical Hardware Pentesting: A guide to attacking embedded systems efficiently through hardware and defending against the most common hardware attacks

Explore embedded systems pentesting by applying the most common attack techniques and patterns

Key Features

• Learn various pentesting tools and techniques to attack and secure your hardware infrastructure
• Find the glitches in your hardware that can be a possible entry point for attacks
• Discover best practices for securely designing products

Book Description

Hardware pentesting involves leveraging hardware interfaces and communication channels to find vulnerabilities in a device. Practical Hardware Pentesting will help you to 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 will start by setting up your lab from scratch and then gradually work with an advanced hardware lab. The book will help you get to grips with the global architecture of an embedded system and sniff on-board traffic. You will also learn how to identify and formalize threats to the embedded system and understand its relationship with its ecosystem. Later, you will discover how to analyze your hardware and locate its possible system vulnerabilities before going on to explore firmware dumping, analysis, and exploitation. Finally, focusing on the reverse engineering process from an attacker point of view will allow you to 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

This book is for security professionals and researchers who want to get started with hardware security assessment but don't know where to start. Electrical engineers who want to understand how their devices can be attacked and how to protect against these attacks will also find this book useful.

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

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.