Practical Hardware Pentesting

Chapter 2: Understanding Your Target

When we look at the current state of developments in hardware, we can see that developers rely on two assumptions:

• The hardware can be trusted.
• An attacker will not attack the hardware to threaten the software and the ecosystem.

However, if we look at the current situation, we can see that these premises are not true anymore. We own cars, phones, TVs, and other devices, and knowledge about this hardware is not reserved for a handful of electrical engineers anymore. Not only is that knowledge now widespread and accessible, thanks to the internet, but the cost of the tools necessary to mount hardware attacks has gone down drastically.

Attacking the hardware is not only interesting because the trust assumptions ...