The Hardware Hacking Handbook

1 Dental Hygiene: Introduction to Embedded Security

The sheer variety of embedded devices makes studying them fascinating, but that same variety can also leave you scratching your head over yet another shape, package, or weird integrated circuit (IC) and what it means in relation to its security. This chapter begins with a look at various hardware components and the types of software running on them. We then discuss attackers, various attacks, assets and security objectives, and countermeasures to provide an overview of how security threats are modeled. We describe the basics of creating an attack tree you can use both for defensive purposes ...