// Comparison

The Car Hacker's Handbook vs The Hardware Hacking Handbook: Which Should You Read?

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

Intermediate

4/52016

A Guide for the Penetration Tester

Craig Smith

Craig Smith's guide to automotive bus systems (CAN, LIN, FlexRay), ECUs, infotainment surfaces, and how to fuzz, trace and exploit modern vehicles.

Advanced

5/52021

The Hardware Hacking Handbook

Breaking Embedded Security with Hardware Attacks

Jasper van Woudenberg, Colin O'Flynn

Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn (NewAE / ChipWhisperer) on real hardware attacks: bus sniffing, fault injection, side-channel power analysis, and the lab work that turns a black box into a known target.

Read this if

Hardware hackers and security researchers approaching automotive targets. Smith covers CAN bus, ECU reverse engineering, infotainment attacks, and the lab tooling that makes vehicle research possible. The canonical entry point.

Embedded and IoT security researchers ready to move past firmware-only work and pick up the soldering iron. Also the right book for offensive practitioners auditing devices where the chip is the threat model: hardware wallets, automotive ECUs, smart locks, set-top boxes.

Skip this if

Pure software-security practitioners with no hardware bench. The book assumes you'll have an OBD-II adapter, an oscilloscope, and a target ECU within reach.

Readers who only want to read about hardware hacking. The book assumes you will buy a logic analyzer, a ChipWhisperer or similar, and break a few dev boards; without lab time, the middle chapters become abstract.

Key takeaways

Modern vehicles are networks of dozens of ECUs talking over CAN; understanding the bus is the prerequisite for everything else.
Infotainment systems are now the most accessible attack surface; the book's framing of the dual stack (Linux/Android infotainment + safety-critical ECUs) is the right model.
Vehicle security research requires a real lab; the chapters on hardware setup and bus interception save weeks of reinvention.

Side-channel and fault-injection attacks are no longer exotic: with sub-$300 tooling, an attacker can pull keys from MCUs that ship in shipping products today.
Bus interception (UART, JTAG, SWD, SPI flash dumps) is the unglamorous workhorse of hardware research and pays for itself across nearly every target.
Threat modeling for hardware is fundamentally different from software: physical access changes the cost curve of every attack, and the chapters on adversary models reflect that.

How they compare

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

The Car Hacker's Handbook is pitched at intermediate level. The Hardware Hacking Handbook is pitched at advanced level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

The Car Hacker's Handbook and The Hardware Hacking Handbook both cover Embedded, Reverse Engineering, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

The Car Hacker's Handbook

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