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

Why C and not Arduino?

The C programming language has a reputation for being hard to use and complex. Trust me, it is not. This reputation comes from the fact it doesn't come with a lot of the convenience functions of more modern languages. The simplicity that comes with this language makes it shine when the resources are constrained and when the execution needs to be really efficient, like on a microcontroller!

While I am quite sure that most of the examples in the book could be written using the Arduino IDE and API, it would do the following:

Hide too much of the compilation chain and the programming process from you
Prevent you from actually understanding the capabilities of the chip
Make it difficult for you to actually know what is happening on the chip (since it uses some of the chip capabilities to provide you with convenience functions)
Actually consume quite a bit of storage space to provide you with these convenience functions

All of this...