Practical Hardware Pentesting

Chapter 11: Static Reverse Engineering and Analysis

In this chapter, we will look into the analysis of a piece of code, without having it execute. The approach we will use is, first, to have a look at the code while it is executing. After this, we'll manage to get the code from an external source such as a firmware update, EEPROM dump, or another source. However, we can't get debug access on the CPU because of the absence of JTAG or any other debug interface, because the emulator is unavailable, and other reasons.

In order to be able to understand the code, we will go through the following steps. First, we will understand how an operating system loads code for execution. In doing so, we will look at what an executable format is and why it is ...