Starting off

This is a general guide on how to start researching an unknown product/technology.

Workflow

In 'starting off' we show how we work globally on each product / technology. With this we want to support you in researching vulnerabilities in products / technologies that you know little to nothing about. We hope that this will lower the threshold for you to dive into new / unknown technologies.

We list 3 important points on this page that can help you well. To start with, we show our steps to take while researching and hacking a product / technology. We then put down a list of questions that we ask ourselves during the hacking process. And finally we give a number of tips, which we would like to know in advance, to make the process run as smoothly as possible.

General steps

  • Literature study of the technology/product

  • Usage of product

  • Determine attack vectors

  • Answer the list of questions described below.

  • Prepare scenarios

  • Sort scenarios on real life situations

  • Prioritize scenarios (First passive attacks, DoS as last resort)

  • Work out the scenarios

  • Evaluation

Questions

  • What is it used for?

  • What kind of operating system is running on the product?

  • Which firmware version is the object running on?

  • What kind of protocols does it use?

  • What kind of hardware is needed for research?

    • Things to look out for when buying hardware.

  • Are there any known vulnerabilities?

  • How can you connect to the product/technology?

  • Is it possible to interact with product/technology?

Tips

  • When buying hardware online from foreign countries expect longer delivery time.

  • Hardware that is bought online from an untrusted source might not be as advertised.

  • Organize the attack as well as possible. Create a step-by-step plan, perform preliminary research and simulate a similar situation (mocking).

  • As soon as you start carrying out the attack, carefully consider which attack you are carrying out first. Starting with a DDoS is not the most convenient.

  • Try to determine different attack vectors based on real life situation.

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