My experience of the PIPA (Practical IoT Pentest Associate) Exam (05/02/2025)
The PIPA (Previously known as PJIT) Course is a course that covers the basics of Electrical Engineering, all the way to Reverse Engineering Fimrmware. The course covered: Electical Engineering, How to use Multimeters, Logic Analyzers and UART, How to get shells using a UART Connector, then extract firmware and enumerate a Linux system for interesting files, then finally Reverse Engineer Firmware.
The Exam
This was the first certificaiton I have done, so I definetly felt nervous before starting the exam. I made sure that I had all my notes consolidated and that I covered all the course content. The exam is a 4 day exam, which provides two days for the assessment and two days to write the report.
Post Exam
After submitting the exam, I waited about 48 hours then heard a response.... to find out I failed. It turns out I had all findings I needed, but they lacked explanation. My issue was that I got too straight to the point with my findings, and did not provide a full end to end descrption of the finding. Thankfully, TCM Security allow 1 resit, so I learnt from my mistake and redid the exam, significantly improved my report and passed the certificaiton! I d recommend this certification for anyone who wants to learn IoT Pentesting.