Hardware Technique

Goal: gain privileged access to an embedded or peripheral device, extract and analyze its firmware, and identify actionable vulnerabilities — within authorized scope and with minimum physical damage risk.

When this technique applies

• Black-box assessment of a router, IoT gateway, industrial panel, smart appliance, or custom embedded board.
• Physical access to a printer, kiosk, ATM, or network appliance for red team validation.
• Post-procurement firmware analysis of a device before deployment.
• Red team scenario requiring extraction of credentials, keys, or configuration from a physical device.
• Authorized printer/peripheral exploitation via network-exposed management protocols.

Boundary with other skills

• RF and wireless: signal capture, SDR, Wi-Fi, BLE → wireless-technique.
• ICS field protocols: Modbus, DNP3, S7, EtherNet/IP exploitation → ics-technique.
• CTF lab hardware tasks: .sal captures, challenge firmware, CTF framing → hardware-ctf.
• Firmware static/dynamic reversing: deep binary analysis after extraction → reversing-technique.
• Physical evidence handling: forensic acquisition → forensic-technique.