Phones, sensors, and embedded boards end up in strangers’ hands — learn to keep secrets, firmware, and fleet updates safe anyway.
Your app shipped. Your sensor is on a customer’s wall. Neither sits behind your firewall any more, and the person attacking it can unscrew the case, solder onto a debug port, and read your flash chip at their leisure. That is the problem this course starts from. You build a physical-access threat model, then work through what holds up under it: how the iOS and Android sandboxes differ, where secrets belong (Keychain, Android Keystore) and where they do not, certificate pinning, and Play Integrity. You put hardware roots of trust to work — Trusted Platform Module (TPM), Apple’s Secure Enclave, ARM TrustZone, Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) — for secure boot and key attestation, and see how timing, power, and glitching attacks break naive implementations. Then the radios: Bluetooth Low Energy pairing, WiFi 802.1X, Zigbee, Thread, Matter, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), plus pulling firmware off a board over UART or JTAG and reading it in Binwalk and Ghidra. It closes where product reality bites: root and jailbreak detection, obfuscation, digital rights management, and over-the-air update pipelines that patch a fleet without bricking it. Four modules, forty tasks, five capstones — pick one and ship it.
Built by Lakshya Kumar
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I am learning device security — mobile platform models (iOS sandboxing, Android permissions, Play Integrity), hardware roots of trust (TPM, Secure Enclave, TrustZone, SGX), key attestation, side-channels and fault injection, IoT protocols (BLE, WiFi-Enterprise, Zigbee/Thread/Matter, MQTT), firmware extraction and analysis (binwalk, Ghidra), anti-tampering / DRM / obfuscation, and fleet operations (MDM, OTA, key rotation). Help me work through the actual mechanics with reference to Apple Platform Security, Android Source, OWASP MASTG, and real-world vendor implementations.
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Put the private key somewhere your own code cannot read it, and prove to a server that the chip — not an emulator — is answering.
Sniff the pairing, pull the flash, read the firmware — do it to your own product before somebody else does it to your customers.
Make tampering expensive on the client, then push a signed fix to every unit in the field and roll it back the moment health gates trip.
Complete all modules, then submit the required number of capstone projects. Each must earn a passing rating from an admin reviewer.
Pick a real mobile app you control (yours or open-source). Produce a 2-page threat model covering physical, network, and supply-chain surfaces. Audit against OWASP MASTG. Fix at least 5 findings (e.g. switch storage to Keychain/Keystore, add cert pinning, add root/jailbreak detection, harden the manifest, enable R8 obfuscation). Document.
Design and prototype an authentication flow that requires hardware-attested keys. On Android: Keystore + key attestation, server verifies cert chain rooted in Google's attestation root. On iOS: App Attest. Server: validates attestation extension and binds attested key to user. Document trust assumptions, rotation, and revocation.
Pick a real consumer IoT device (legally — yours, or with vendor permission). Audit physical, wireless, and cloud surfaces. Where legally permitted, extract firmware (via UART/JTAG/SPI flash). Run binwalk + Ghidra; identify the auth path; flag any hardcoded credentials, debug accounts, or insecure protocols. Produce a 3-page audit report.
Pick a hypothetical or real IoT product. Design the end-to-end OTA pipeline: artefact signing infrastructure (with key rotation), staged rollout (1% → 10% → 100%), health gates, automatic rollback, customer comms templates. Aim for 'patch a CVE within 48 hours on 99% of fleet, with 100% rollback safety'. Document the architecture, threat model, and rollout playbook.
Design a supply-chain defense plan for an embedded device's firmware: SBOM generation, signed build pipeline, reproducible build verification, attestation chain from build to deployment. Tabletop a compromise scenario and demonstrate detection at each layer.
Definitive reference for iOS, Secure Enclave, codesigning.