Beginner's Guide to IoT and Hardware Hacking

The Beginner’s Guide to IoT and Hardware Hacking course teaches foundational skills and techniques required to get started performing security research and testing on IoT devices and hardware. This course focuses mainly on the hardware aspects of IoT hacking and how to use the underlying access to physical hardware to aid in and amplify the ability to hunt for vulnerabilities. While this course is a “beginners” level for IoT and Hardware Hacking the difficulty level as an overall cybersecurity course is intermediate. This course is open to everyone but has been specifically created for students who are familiar with software-based penetration testing (such as network, web and mobile) and want to learn how to bridge those skills over to IoT and Hardware testing.

Requirements:

·    A general understanding of penetration testing methods and methodology and a general understanding of Linux are strongly recommended.

·        A computing environment (Windows, Linux, or Mac*) capable of running a virtual machine with at least 8GB of RAM and 40GB of disk space. *Note that new MacBook Pros with the M1 chip are unable to run virtual machines such as the ones demonstrated in this course.

·        If you want to follow along with all the hands-on portions of the course, you’ll need to purchase the physical equipment and tools used in the course; you can find a full list in the second lesson of the course which is available for preview. Note that some hands-on portions of the course can be completed without physical hardware. 

Topics Covered:

·        Electrical engineering and electronics fundamentals

·        Understanding and identifying common electronic components

·        How to use common hardware hacking tools such as digital multimeters, logic analyzers, USB to serial adapters and flash programmers

·        An optional lesson on soldering

·        Performing OSINT and recon on hardware

·        How to read and interpret datasheets

·        Common IoT protocols such as UART and SPI

·        Initiating and using a serial shell

·        Firmware extraction methods

·        Firmware analysis and reverse engineering