I recently attended Dr. Dmitry Nedospasov’s 4-day “Hardware Hacking, Reversing and Instrumentation” training class as part of the HardwareSecurity.training event in San Francisco. I learned a lot, and it was incredibly fun class. If you understand the basics of hardware security and want to take it to the next level, this is the course for you.

The class predominantly focuses on the use of FPGAs for breaking security in hardware devices (embedded devices, microcontrollers, etc.). The advantage of FPGAs is that they can be used to implement arbitrary protocols and can operate with very high timing resolution. (e.g., single clock cycle, since it’s essentially synthesized hardware.)

The particular FPGA board used in this class is the Digilent Arty, based on the Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA. This board is clocked at 100 MHz, allowing 10ns resolution for high-speed protocols, timing attacks, etc. The development board contains over 33,000 logic cells with more than 20,000 LUTs and 40,000 flip-flops. (And if you don’t know what those things are, don’t worry, it’s explained in the class!) The largest project in the class only uses about 1% of the resources of this FPGA, so there’s plenty for more complex operations after the class.

Dmitry is obviously very knowledgable as an instructor and has a very direct and hands-on style. If you’re looking for someone to spoon feed you the course material, this won’t be the course you’re looking for. If, on the other hand, you prefer to learn by doing and just need an instructor to get you started and help you if you have issues, Dmitry has the perfect teaching style for you.

You should have some knowledge of basic hardware topics before starting the class. Knowing basic logic gates (AND, OR, NAND, XOR, etc.), basic electronics (i.e., how to supply power and avoid short circuits), and being familiar with concepts like JTAG and UARTs will help. I’ve taken several other hardware security classes before (including with Joe Fitzpatrick, another of the HardwareSecurity.training instructors and organizers) and I found that background knowledge quite useful. If you don’t know the basics, I highly reccommend taking a course like Joe’s “Applied Physical Attacks on Embedded Systems and IoT” first.

The first day of the class is mostly lecture about the architecture of FPGAs and basic Verilog. Some Verilog is written and results simulated in the Xilinx Vivado tool. Beginning with the second day, work moves to the actual FPGA, beginning with a task as “simple” as implementing a UART in hardware, then moving to using the FPGA to brute force a PIN on a microcontroller, and finally moving on to a timing attack against the microcontroller. Many of the projects are implemented with the performance-critical parts done in Verilog on the FPGA and then communicating with a Python script for logic & calculation.

I really enjoyed the course – it was challenging, but not defeatingly so, and I learned quite a few new things from it. This was my first exposure to FPGAs and Verilog, but I now feel I could successfully use an FPGA for a variety of projects, and look forward to finding something interesting to try with it.