// Comparison

Attacking Network Protocols vs The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Offensive, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Advanced

5/52017

A Hacker's Guide to Capture, Analysis, and Exploitation

James Forshaw

James Forshaw, Project Zero veteran, on how to capture, parse, and break protocols from the wire up to the application layer, with a strong focus on building reusable analysis tooling.

Advanced

4/52026

The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook

Exploiting Ground Stations, Flight Software, and Satellite Terminals

Andrzej Olchawa, Milenko Starcik

A hands-on tour of the full attack surface of a modern space system, from the ground stations that send commands to the flight software on the spacecraft and the satellite terminals that consume the signal.

Read this if

Anyone who needs to understand traffic, not just see it. Forshaw is the rare Project Zero veteran who can also teach; the book turns network protocol analysis into a learnable craft.

Hardware and embedded security practitioners who want to extend offensive skills into an attack surface that increasingly underpins internet, GPS, weather, and defense infrastructure. Hands-on labs have readers write working exploits against flight software, not just read case studies.

Skip this if

Beginners who haven't yet handled a pcap, or readers who only want HTTP/web. The book covers Layer 2 through application-level RPC, and the value compounds the deeper you go.

Readers without hardware or embedded-systems fundamentals already in place; this is a genuinely novel, narrow domain built on top of general hardware-hacking skills, not a substitute for learning them. Start with The Hardware Hacking Handbook or The Car Hacker's Handbook first if those basics aren't there yet.

Key takeaways

Capturing, parsing, and replaying traffic is one workflow, not three, and Forshaw's tooling-first framing makes that explicit.
Custom-protocol auditing (the part security curricula skip) is the part of the book that pays back hardest, especially for embedded, OT, and proprietary stacks.
The "build your own network analysis tool" chapters teach more about how protocols actually work than any number of Wireshark lessons.

Covers all three legs of a space system's attack surface (ground stations, flight software, satellite terminals) rather than just one.
Hands-on labs produce working exploits against real flight-software patterns, keeping the material concrete instead of theoretical.
A domain that is only going to matter more as commercial satellite infrastructure underpins everyday internet and GPS services.

How they compare

We rate Attacking Network Protocols higher (5/5 against 4/5 for The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook). For most readers, that means Attacking Network Protocols is the primary pick and The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook is a useful follow-up.

Both books target advanced-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Attacking Network Protocols and The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook both cover Offensive, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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Attacking Network Protocols

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