// Comparison

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

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

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5/52021

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 The Hardware Hacking Handbook higher (5/5 against 4/5 for The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook). For most readers, that means The Hardware Hacking Handbook 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.

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

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The Hardware Hacking Handbook

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