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Fabian Weber, Florian Schmid, Bastian Könings, Henning Kopp

• Analyzing the security of hardware components is an essential part of penetration tests in the context of embedded systems. Especially in the domain of automotive security and upcoming autonomous vehicles, vulnerabilities of electronic control units (ECUs) may have severe implications and therefore should be identified early in the development process (as also required by new regulations [7, 27]). Typically, the security analysis requires manual probing of pins or other contact pads on the printed circuit boards (PCBs) followed by the attempt to identify signals and respective bus protocols. To increase the efficiency of this hardware analysis and further reduce error-proneness of manual probing steps, we introduce the PROBoter (PROBing roboter) as a novel open-source and self-calibrating architecture for automated PCB analysis as part of a penetration test. The PROBoter consists of four independently moving probes assisted by a camera for the detection of pins and contact pads, and an oscilloscope for signal measurement. Several algorithms allow the automatic probing of voltages at detected pins and contact pads, and subsequently try to identify existing bus protocols. We evaluated the feasibility of our approach using different PCBs and a self-designed test board for signal generation. Our evaluation shows that the PROBoter can detect and probe respective parts of a PCB with high accuracy and can successfully identify selected bus protocols. Our novel approach provides a significant contribution to the field of PCB analysis by automating manual work and thus increasing the efficiency of penetration tests of embedded systems such as automotive ECUs.