Devices: mobile, IoT & OT
Security beyond the data centre: mobile app storage and attestation, firmware and secure boot, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth attacks, and industrial OT and ICS.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) security
In device security, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) security concerns how a device pairs, encrypts and authenticates over the short-range radio that most connected devices carry. It matters because a weak pairing method breaks without expensive equipment, and because BLE is one of the most common wireless surfaces on the devices an IoT assessment covers.
BYOD (bring your own device)
BYOD is the practice of letting employees use their own phones, tablets and laptops for work and to reach corporate resources.
Firmware
Firmware is the low-level software embedded in a device that controls how its hardware behaves. It runs before anything else does, which is exactly why compromising it is worth so much to an attacker.
Firmware analysis
In device security, firmware analysis is the examination of the software embedded in a device to find its weaknesses: extracting it from the hardware, unpacking its filesystem, and reading the code and data inside. It is the parent activity of IoT testing, covering extraction, filesystem inspection and the hunt for embedded secrets.
IEC 62443
IEC 62443 is the international standards series for the security of industrial automation and control systems. It is the reference an industrial client cites in a tender the way ISO 27001 is cited in corporate IT, and it is written for three distinct audiences: the asset owner, the system integrator and the product supplier.
Insecure local storage
Insecure local storage is the retention of sensitive data on a mobile device in a form that another application, a person with the handset, or a backup can read. It is the most frequently reported finding in mobile assessments and the easiest to demonstrate, because it needs no exploit at all.
OT and ICS security
In industrial security, OT and ICS security covers the protection of operational technology and industrial control systems: the equipment that runs physical processes in factories, utilities and infrastructure. It is the vocabulary of the industrial client who buys IoT testing and who falls under NIS2, and where safety and availability outrank confidentiality.
OWASP MASVS
In mobile security, OWASP MASVS (Mobile Application Security Verification Standard) is a framework that sets the security requirements a mobile app should meet, grouped by area. It defines the scope of a mobile penetration test and structures its report, the way the OWASP Top 10 structures a web test. It is the standard, paired with the separate MASTG testing guide.
Secure boot
In device security, secure boot is a chain of trust that verifies the signature of each boot stage before running it, so modified firmware or a tampered operating system will not start. It is the control that separates a rootkit from a bootkit: a bootkit persists in the boot chain below the operating system, exactly where secure boot enforces trust.
Side-channel attack
In security, a side-channel attack recovers a secret not by breaking the algorithm but by measuring what the implementation leaks while it runs: the time it takes, the power it draws, its electromagnetic emissions, or its effect on a shared cache. It has two faces: hardware in embedded devices, and timing in software.