IoT Security Course — Summary & Syllabus

Source: dvid-security/courses Author: @vulcainreo / DVID

Overview

This repository contains the full slide deck source (YAML/Markdown) for an IoT Security course, covering the entire "chain of data" of a connected object: hardware, firmware, middleware protocols, mobile, cloud, and PKI/certificates. Practical work is built around our DVID (Damn Vulnerable IoT Device) , an intentionally vulnerable board used to apply each concept hands-on (flashing firmware, sniffing protocols, exploiting misconfigurations, etc.).

The course is organized into 6 modules (M0–M5), each split into several chapters (submodules), moving progressively from foundational concepts to hardware attacks, middleware/protocol pentesting, cloud security, and end-to-end data-chain security.

PDF format of slides are available on the export branch https://github.com/dvid-security/courses/tree/export

Syllabus

Module 1 — Concepts, Protocols and Referentials

• Introduction
• Security and Architecture (security vs. safety, security properties)
• Communication Protocols (UART, etc.)
• Referentials (OWASP IoT projects, security methodologies)
• Embedded Object Discovering (recon methodology for embedded devices)

Module 2 — Hardware and Firmware Attacks

• Introduction
• Hardware (electronics basics: power, GND, VCC)
• Hardware Analysis (board/component recon)
• Hardware Attacks (side-channel, power monitoring, etc.)
• Bootloader (U-Boot, RedBoot, Bareboot)
• Firmware (definition, extraction, analysis)
• Well-Known Vulnerabilities (OWASP IoT Top 10 walkthrough)

Module 3 — Middleware

• Introduction
• MQTT (protocol overview and exploitation)
• Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE stack, GAP/GATT, sniffing)
• CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol)
• Android (platform overview, security basics)
• Pentesting (OWASP Mobile Top 10 applied to IoT companion apps)

Module 4 — Cloud

• Introduction
• Cloud Architecture and Threats
• Top Well-Known Web Vulnerabilities (injection, XSS, etc.)
• API (concepts and security)
• Pentesting (cookies, sessions, web attack techniques)
• Best Practices (input sanitization, secure coding)
• Rex From Battlefield: real pentest findings exercise (15 situations to diagnose)

Module 5 — Chain of Data

• Introduction
• Cloud Providers (AWS IoT, Azure IoT, Google Cloud IoT, IBM Watson IoT, Salesforce IoT)
• Real Life Architecture (end-to-end IoT architecture examples)
• Certificate and PKI (symmetric/asymmetric crypto, certificate chains)
• Pentesting (full chain-of-data methodology, incl. insecure MQTT broker case study)

Open Source & Contributions

All course content is open source. Contributions are welcome via merge requests — feel free to fix, extend, or improve the slides and submit a merge request.

Automatic PDF Export

The PDF export is fully automated: a GitHub Actions workflow builds the HTML slides from the YAML/Markdown sources and generates PDF versions on every push to the main branch, publishing them to the export branch. There is no manual export step required.

License

The course content is released under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3). This means anyone is free to use, study, share, and modify the material, provided that any distributed derivative work is also licensed under GPLv3 and its source is made available. As with any GPLv3-licensed work, the software/content comes with no warranty, and proper attribution and license notices should be preserved when redistributing.