You're reading from Practical Hardware Pentesting A guide to attacking embedded systems and protecting them against the most common hardware attacks

Product type Paperback

Published in Apr 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781789619133

Length 382 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

Embedded Systems

Concepts

Embedded Systems

Author (1):

Jean-Georges Valle

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Table of Contents (20) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Getting to Know the Hardware

2. Chapter 1: Setting Up Your Pentesting Lab and Ensuring Lab Safety FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Understanding Your Target

4. Chapter 3: Identifying the Components of Your Target

5. Chapter 4: Approaching and Planning the Test

6. Section 2: Attacking the Hardware

7. Chapter 5: Our Main Attack Platform

8. Chapter 6: Sniffing and Attacking the Most Common Protocols

9. Chapter 7: Extracting and Manipulating Onboard Storage

10. Chapter 8: Attacking Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and BLE

11. Chapter 9: Software-Defined Radio Attacks

12. Section 3: Attacking the Software

13. Chapter 10: Accessing the Debug Interfaces

14. Chapter 11: Static Reverse Engineering and Analysis

15. Chapter 12: Dynamic Reverse Engineering

16. Chapter 13: Scoring and Reporting Your Vulnerabilities

17. Chapter 14: Wrapping It Up – Mitigations and Good Practices

18. Assessments

19. Other Books You May Enjoy

Debugging/programming protocols – What are they and what are they used for?

The in-circuit debugging protocols have legitimate usages that we can use and abuse for our tests. First, let's see how they are supposed to be used.

Legitimate usage

The debug protocols are used to achieve multiple goals and some are listed here:

Test the physical soldering of the boards (this was the initial goal of JTAG).
Program the chips in development or production.
Help in debugging the programs during development.

Since the board will have the main micro-controller interact with the chips that are on the circuit board, it can be hard to develop in a completely simulated environment. This is because, unlike a general-purpose computer, there is almost no commonality between two different boards (a general-purpose computer has an OS and this OS provides a good layer of hardware abstraction).