// Comparison

The Car Hacker's Handbook vs Practical IoT Hacking: 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.

Intermediate

4/52021

Practical IoT Hacking

The Definitive Guide to Attacking the Internet of Things

Fotios Chantzis, Ioannis Stais, Paulino Calderon, Evangelos Deirmentzoglou, Beau Woods

Five-author guide to IoT pentesting covering hardware probing, radio (BLE / Zigbee / LoRa), embedded firmware, and the protocols that connect cheap devices to vulnerable backends.

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.

Pentesters branching into hardware and embedded targets. The book's coverage spans hardware probing (UART, JTAG, SWD), radio (BLE, Zigbee, LoRa), firmware analysis, and the protocols cheap devices speak to vulnerable backends. The most current general IoT book in print.

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.

Pure software pentesters who don't want a hardware bench. Several chapters require oscilloscope, logic analyzer, or SDR access to follow.

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.

IoT is a stack: hardware, firmware, protocols, cloud. The book's strength is teaching all four as one continuous attack surface.
Radio attacks (BLE, Zigbee, LoRa) are now mainstream pentest territory; the chapters introducing SDR-based analysis are the practical entry point.
Firmware extraction-then-analysis is the core skill; the book's hardware chapters cover the extraction half, then hand off to standard binary-analysis tooling for the rest.

How they compare

The Car Hacker's Handbook and Practical IoT Hacking are both rated 4/5 in our catalog. Pick by topic preference and reading style rather than by rating.

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

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

Keep reading

The Car Hacker's Handbook

→ Alternatives to The Car Hacker's Handbook → What to read after The Car Hacker's Handbook