Embedded devices now power everything from consumer electronics and industrial systems to critical infrastructure and connected cities. Yet many of these devices are still deployed with weak bootloaders, insecure firmware updates, exposed debug interfaces, and cryptographic implementations that fail under real-world attack.
Embedded Security: Protecting Your Devices from Bootloader to Firmware Updates is a practical, engineering-focused guide to securing embedded and IoT systems from first instruction to long-term deployment.
This book goes beyond theory and checklists. It shows how embedded systems actually fail and how attackers exploit physical leakage, timing behavior, and flawed update mechanisms to recover keys, bypass secure boot, and permanently compromise devices. Through real examples, code snippets, and hardware-level analysis, you'll learn how to design systems that remain secure in the field.
You will explore:
Secure boot chains and hardware roots of trust
Firmware signing and encryption for authenticity and confidentiality
Secure OTA update pipelines with rollback protection
Side-channel attacks, including power analysis and timing attacks
Constant-time cryptographic implementations on microcontrollers
Hardware security modules and secure elements
Debug interface lockdown and physical attack mitigation
Rather than assuming ideal hardware or unlimited resources, this book focuses on the constraints real engineers face: limited memory, cost pressure, physical access by attackers, and devices that must operate securely for years.
Code examples and design patterns target popular platforms such as STM32, ESP32, and similar microcontrollers, but the principles apply across embedded systems. Each chapter emphasizes why vulnerabilities occur, not just how to fix them-giving you the insight needed to make informed security decisions.
If you design, build, or maintain embedded or IoT devices-and want them to survive contact with the real world-this book will help you engineer security correctly from the start.
