Here at La-Tecnologia, we publish glorious informative articles about other hardware piracy spaces, and we even have our own university with courses covering the subjects one by one. I’ve had my own percentage of fabrics that I’ve learned theory from and I’ve been hacking practicalities over the years, as is, for over 13 years. When such fabrics were not available for a specific topic, I would scour a bunch of forum pages looking for main points on a specific topic. , or spend hours suffering with a complexity that everyone took for granted.
Today, I’d like to highlight one of the most comprehensive advances in hardware hacking that I’ve noticed so far: from general principles to technical details, covering all degrees of complexity, bridging theory and practice. This is the Hardware Piracy Handbook, via Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O’Flynn. In four hundred pages you will discover as a whole such an imaginable advent to the subversion of the material. None of the nuances are taken for granted; Instead, this book aims to fill in any gaps you may have, placing words to explain each applicable concept on top-to-bottom levels.
In addition to general principles and examples of hardware hacking, this eeebook concentrates on the spaces of fault injection and force research: underrated spaces of hardware security that you should be aware of, given that any of those practices provide you with superstrength when it comes to hacking hardware. It makes sense, since those spaces are the focus of [Colin] and [Jasper’s] investigation, and they can provide you with anything they wouldn’t tell you anywhere else. You’d do well to have a ChipWhisperer on hand if I wanted to repeat some of the things this ebook shows, but it’s not a requirement. For starters, the hardware hacking theory presented in the ebook is anything that you would gain advantages from in one way or another.
Having a solid theoretical foundation on hardware piracy goes a long way. Don’t get me wrong, read our articles and learn about informed examples of your fellow hackers’ paintings; However, there will be structural loopholes when it comes to how to hack hardware. interact with each other and what else happens there.
Traditionally, such gaps would be by universities and educational courses, taking a lot of information, structuring it and then gifting that structure for you to sort all further knowledge into. Sadly, we know that even if you can find a professor, it’s not a requirement that their lectures are engaging – or up to date with modern times. This book spends a hundred pages creating a structure for you, a categorized bookshelf to sort your books into. In order to have a complete picture of hardware and never run out of ways to approach it, it helps if you understand your device in the same way that a hardware security understand s it, and both of our authors worked tirelessly to convey their mental frameworks to you, with plentiful examples.
Whether it’s going through the blueprints of Intel processors and pointing out other areas, showing the signal lines of the protocol to demystify what’s really going on with a signal, or explaining the hidden perspectives in the other features of the PCB that you can find on the board. You’re arguing, you take a look at an expert’s brain as you go through the examples they give you. He also doesn’t shy away from discussing topics like cryptography, anything a hacker may not know they can use and might be forced to do so. In fact, it’s arguably one of the most important topics that such an ebook can also address, and it is. Before they start extracting RSA keys, they perform RSA calculations related to cryptographic signatures. – While it’s beneficial to have some knowledge of algebra, it’s not necessary and you can supplement it with anything like the RSA calculator we recently covered.
Without a doubt, they want examples, because that is how we best inform ourselves. With these complex techniques in hand, they take the Trezor One cryptocurrency, a device that is currently sold online, and bypass its security measures, extracting the personal keys stored in the wallet. Focusing on strength and disorders research will pay off here; in fact, almost literally. This demonstration is complex and voluminous enough to deserve its own chapter, and even if you don’t follow the steps as you go through it, the attack connects the concepts you’ve noticed together, helping you make connections between what you’ve noticed. I have read and what to do when you want to extract secrets from your own device.
The authors make sure to keep the theory firmly coupled to real-world hardware as the book progresses. As training grounds for the Trezor wallet foray, you’ll be taught you how to solder a FET to the underside of a Raspberry Pi 3B+ PCB in order to glitch the CPU power rail and try making the CPU skip instructions. This exercise assumes you have a ChipWhisperer, though just the Lite version will do, but if you want to get real results anyway without the precise timing that the ChipWhisperer brings, you can use an ATMega328P and a piezoelectric generator from a BBQ lighter – giving you insights without tying the book’s value to a piece of extra hardware.
Then, they move on to strength research, anything you might do with an oscilloscope, and walk you through the basics. This is a bankruptcy that I’m simply going over myself, as this ebook is as informative as it gets. However, I have the best information. I’m very hopeful about this, as force analysis is a relatively non-invasive way to extract data and also an attack vector that most of the existing hardware is sensitive to, making this component of the eeebook a priority. I have some free time in my schedule. In fact, about a third of this eeebook is faithful to strength research techniques, from the simplest to the most advanced, and goes through various test setups, even with an Arduino-based goal to get your feet wet.
Of course, some of the hardware hacker’s power lies in the equipment, so it’s hard to write an e-book like that and not expect the reader to have some quick tools. The authors are aware of this, which is why an entire bankrupt is faithful to equipping their own laboratory, with budgets ranging from the highest to the lowest. You will be able to modify or reuse many of the tools, or use them through a nearby, easy-to-use hackerspace. At first, skip them at most, but when you run into a problem with a component, it’s helpful to know that there is a tool that meets your specific needs.
Since the release of this eBook, Colin has once again pushed the frontier of side-channel attacks. Last year, he gave a statement at Remoticon about MS injection disorders and gave us an available method to achieve this without any sophisticated hardware requirements. These side-channel attacks are an evolving domain that chips will continue to be vulnerable to for the foreseeable future, and this eBook will keep you informed on how those strategies are implemented when unlocking yours.
For newcomers, such a promising analysis chart provides a perfect opportunity for hardware acquisition, as many other attack surfaces that we’ve known about for years are now well-protected and don’t work as well in the wild. Professionals will undoubtedly find some blind spots in their wisdom that it would be smart to eliminate. We still don’t have a generation to download data into our brains; As it stands, books are the closest thing to this, and The Hardware Hacking Handbook is a respectable attempt to teach you what hardware hackers like [Jasper] and [Colin] know.
A German edition of the would be great.
Sorry to be that guy, but if you really want to do electronics or almost any science-related stuff you will need to learn some english. Technical english is not the one from Shakespeare and stuff like this, it is actually not too hard to learn enough english to at least understand some things from datasheets and technical books. I couldn’t read any Shakespeare stuff, but for technical stuff my comprehension is fine. And if needed there is always an internet connection to some dictionary somewhere.
Heh, and going the other way, a chemical engineer pretty much had to have some working German up until the late 1950s, as most of the major research and documentation tended to be German. There are still a few niches where it’s occasionally difficult to make progress on a project if you can’t piece together enough German to read the relevant papers. Many of the more arcane papers were never translated, especially ones that ended up superseded by improved methods.
A few years ago, a relative had to dig through a few hundred kilos of dusty microfiche to obtain important information about the optimization of a specific artificial lubricant process, related to Fischer-Tropsch. It is not so strange for modern interests that no one has acted in recent decades, which is why all existing main points are only in German. Apparently, after a few hours of flying, any sudden exposure to English seemed like a headache. . .
It was easy to informally learn enough technical German to complete the task. According to one of my relative’s colleagues, it’s much more complicated to do the opposite. English is much more adaptable and multi-paradigmatic, which guarantees a long duration. term scalable success. But in return, being informed in English requires internalizing the paradigms of several very different language families, changed over centuries of adaptation. That doesn’t make it impossible, or even that complicated. That means it’s not that simple to understand. get out on the road.
I was a little worried about an ESL program for a few years (they kept frying the camera packets in the classroom and we had to make sure this was over) and discussions with their linguists and the ESL coaching staff tended toward this hypothesis.
“English is more adaptable and multi-paradigmatic, ensuring long-term evolutionary success. “
People and their constant abuse of Darwin and the theory of evolution. . .
English is prevalent because it is easy, adaptable, organic, or anything else that other people characterize it as, which is incorrect.
English is so widespread due to its colonial past, many countries having it as official language, being the business language (also due to old time colonial past and strong business connections).
It’s not because of the language itself. English is “easy” because other people are exposed to it anywhere and at any time. German is logically easier and its pronunciation is much more logical.
The great “disadvantage” of German is the longer words and terms, which at the same time is its advantage: it is sometimes possible to guess the meaning of new and unfamiliar words. This also leads to a different way of thinking and concepts that you don’t get in other languages.
Take any rather complex sentence and English is almost never so undeniable anymore.
Overall, being multilingual is an advantage, as it provides other perspectives, inspirations, mindsets, and cultural backgrounds.
German here.
So, yes, it is a *lot* more easier today to access knowledge, but still today native speakers of the language often underestimate the steep learning curve if you not only have to grasp concepts and ideas of the problem domain, but stumble at the first few abbreviations or terms. “snubber” for example was in none of my printed paper dictionaries back then, when I stepped into electronics.
As for the “just get informed in English, man” subtext vibes, which I’ve also gained a lot over the years. . . Well, wait another 10 years and they will take you to 只学普通话,伙计. . . Even though I’ll be 60 years old by then, I’ll give it a try and hope a Chinese user will patiently explain it to me.
Often German already gives an approximate idea, not only because of the principle of composition, but also because German himself tries to be clear.
You can buy the Kindle edition and use the built-in dictionary to look up words you don’t understand, this way you’ll be informed (more) in English as you read the book.
The-Technology starts with a list of piracy books!
1 for a tech-to-playlist
2 for Hackaday playlist
The-Technology Playlist = 1
Could make for a fun book club 😉 Is there much of a community around hackaday? The comments always seem active, is there a living discord or anything?
There’s a Discord yes! Other than that, our network is our readers and Arrayio members, like me, which is a significant number of people!
And a La-Tecnologia book club!
Boom! I added a “Must Read” series tag and now a total of them are indexed on the back.
I’m not sure I have them all yet, but it’s a start!
I’ve been a prowler for a long time, but this is the first time I’ve posted a comment!I’m glad it’s a smart thing to do:)
Thank you Elliot, you are a glorious human being.
I invented “The Hardware Hacker” through Andrew “bunnie” Huang. Another smart e-book to read.
And also the opposite engineering of PCBs.
Do you have details? Is it a book, a YouTube series, or. . . ?
Good book, thank you. Libgen did.
I can tell you where I can get a copy of the book.
You know Amazon, right? By the way, on Arraraycom it shows me -30%, so it’s not that expensive, on my local Amazon it’s much more. :-/ I’m not sure about buying this, it seems confusing and I already have too many books to read and things to try. . .
Oh, the book is rarely very confusing to read, in my experience, the story is cohesive and fluid!Even if you still don’t like the power/analytics, I’d like to buy it just for “how it all works”. “In the introductory chapters, the context provided is broad and flows easily.
NoStarch books appear in Humble Bundle deals, but you may have to wait a bit.
It’s on Amazon
If we’re going for a Hackaday reading list, I would like to nominate Nicholas Collins’ Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. It has a lot of stuff that @Eliot Williams covered in the Logic Noise series and then some. The Radio Shack part lists may be obsolete, but the hacks/builds are not. Great intro to hardware and electronics from the musician’s perspective.
Did you or others have any other recommendations? There are no promises, but it’s great to put things on our radar!
1 for handmade electronic music, also Make: Analog Synthesizers via Ray Wilson is some other ebook in the same genre.
3 for The-Technology playlist
Always one more than you! ™ for the La-Tecnologia playlist
In Black Hat right now. I’m quite disappointed not to find this among the other No Starch Press books in bookstores. I guess it’s more of a DEFCON thing, but I’m still hopeful. I think I’ll have to get a copy when I get home.
The kind of hacks described in the book seems to be used in a Starlink user terminal hack : https://www.wired.co.uk/article/starlink-internet-dish-hack
Not relevant today, but in the 1990s I sold CD “Hacker” info, (Resold, I didn’t make them) and they were popular with the noobs.
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