Microcontroller Exploits - by Travis Goodspeed (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Microcontroller Exploits is a deep dive into advanced hardware hacking with detailed examples of real-world techniques and a comprehensive survey of vulnerabilities.

In this advanced guide to hardware hacking, you'll learn how to read the software out of single chip computers, especially when they are configured not to allow the firmware to be extracted.

This book documents a very wide variety of microchip hacking techniques; it's not a beginner's first introduction.

You'll start off by exploring detailed techniques for hacking real-world chips, such as how the STM32F0 allows for one word to be dumped after every reset. You'll see how the STM32F1's exception handling can slowly leak the firmware out over an hour, and how the Texas Instruments MSP430 firmware can be extracted by a camera flash.

For each exploit, you'll learn how to reproduce the results, dumping a chip in your own lab.

In the second half of the book you'll find an encyclopedic survey of vulnerabilities, indexed and cross referenced for use in practicing hardware security.

Review Quotes

"This is both a fascinating and profoundly disturbing book. On the fascinating side, it is a cornucopia of great information . . . On the disturbing side, all that great and profoundly useful information is now gathered in one place and presented by a master."
--Richard Austin, IEEE-Cipher (Read More)

"Understanding the pitfalls of microcontroller security is hard, because there are many exquisite and obscure bits of knowledge that must all work together. Before this book, there was only one effective way to learn: talk to a master practitioner like Travis. This book gives a broad and deep survey of the craft, but most importantly it gets the many critical bits in one place, under one cover. I am sure it will become a foundation of many career-changing classes. One day I hope to get good enough to teach one!"
--Sergey Bratus, Distinguished Professor in Cyber Security, Technology, and Society, Dartmouth College

"We don't have many books focused on such a topic, but face security problems tied to hardware and specifically to microcontrollers every day. Travis's book is foundational to understanding the security problems and how the attackers are going to exploit them. This book is a must-read for every product security team involved in device security."
-- Alex Matrosov, CEO and Founder of Binarly

"The book presents an inspiring and much-anticipated collection of microcontroller security vulnerabilities and exploits - presented by Travis himself. All the examples serve as an excellent reference of attack vectors that had often been excluded as being "out-of-scope" and "nobody would do that" until proven otherwise. This book is very hands-on and a great read for everyone interested in hardware security. I dearly hope that this book will also find its audience amongst chip vendors and especially their teams designing the next generation security architectures."
--Dr. Johannes Obermaier, security engineer and researcher

About the Author

Travis Goodspeed is an embedded systems reverse engineer from Tennessee, where he drives a Studebaker and collects memory extraction exploits for microcontrollers. His recent projects include a function recognizer for Thumb2 firmware, a fresh memory corruption exploit for a 90's smart card, and a CAD tool for extracting bits from mask ROM photographs.