Honest Review of Practical IoT Pentest Associate (PIPA) by TCM Security

I was doing IoT penetration test lately at work and I’m kinda curious if my methodology is usable also in this practical exam so I tried the PIPA (Practical IoT Pentest Associate) last weekend.

Experience and Tips:

1. You will be given a firmware and some logic captures for you to analyze and afterwards, you must create a professional penetration test report to be reviewed by the TCM Security team.
2. Most of your time will be spent in reverse engineering the firmware so if you are still not confident in doing this then you should practice now.
3. For the hardware part, there will be logic analyzer capture that will be given for you to assess and I think this is the easiest part in the exam.
4. Practice on hunting vulnerabilities in a firmware.

Feedback:

1. I love how the TCM Sec team created the firmware since it is similar in some of the past firmware that I encounter in testing.
2. As the time goes by, a lot of firmware right now that I am testing are being encrypted so might be a good additional to teach the people in certain techniques about it to make the course still up-to-date. Some IoT-related workshop I attended like “Hunting Zero Days in Embedded Devices” by Pwn2Own winners Pedro and Radek in Italy included techniques in decrypting firmware.
3. When I did IoT pentest at work, there are three big things that the client always want to be tested: hardware, firmware and radio frequency. This is true especially for IoT devices that has wireless connection such as LoRa, NB-IoT, Bluetooth etc. After all, in IoT OWASP Top 10, testing the wireless connections like I mentioned is included so it would be a very good thing to add in the course or exam.
4. The course given is really recommended for beginners so I told my co-pentesters to do the PIPA training if they want to get started also in IoT pentest since although it only tackles the hardware and firmware part, most of what has been taught in the course (and exam) still has some use in the real world IoT pentest.

Conclusion

Do I recommend this certification to others?
If you are a beginner in IoT pentest then YES, this course is for you!
But for the other topics that is mostly needed for real-life IoT pentest like radio frequency analysis and decrypting encrypted firmware then you need to find some other resources other than this.

Verify My PIPA Certification Here: https://certified.tcm-sec.com/8ec44173-d219-4100-84d3-8b5fa2ce6707