Practical Hardware Pentesting: A guide to attacking embedded systems and protecting them against the most common hardware attacks

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.