Practical Hardware Pentesting: Learn attack and defense techniques for embedded systems in IoT and other devices

by Jean-Georges Valle

Overview

Get up to speed with the latest attack techniques and patterns to pentest and secure all your devices

Key Features

• Find the best practices for securely designing your IoT devices with practical examples
• Explore various penetration testing tools and techniques to secure your hardware infrastructure
• Practice attacking and securing various modern devices with step-by-step guidance

Book Description

Practical Hardware Pentesting, Second Edition, is an example-driven guide that will help you plan attacks, hack your embedded devices, and secure the hardware infrastructure. Throughout the book, you’ll explore the functional and security aspects of a device and learn how a system senses and communicates with the outside world. You’ll set up a lab from scratch and gradually work towards an advanced hardware lab. The first part of this book will get you attacking the software of an embedded device. This will get you thinking from an attacker point of view; you’ll understand how devices are attacked, compromised, and how you can harden a device against the most common hardware attack vectors. 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. This 2nd Edition covers real-world examples featuring various devices like smart TVs, baby monitors, or pacemakers, you’ll discover how to analyze hardware and locate its possible vulnerabilities before going on to explore firmware dumping, analysis, and exploitation. By the end of this book, you’ll and understand how to implement best practices 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 and practical 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 pentesting before you get started; everything you need is in the chapters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781803249322
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	02/11/2026
Pages:	398
Product dimensions:	75.00(w) x 92.50(h) x (d)

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 for a leader company in the security and incident response sector. 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.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

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