Engineering · Automotive Cybersecurity
Automotive Penetration Testing Services
ECUs, gateways, telematics, and V2X — attacked on the bench by specialists, then written up as evidence-grade findings for ISO/SAE 21434 Clause 11 verification and UNECE R155 audits. We reason about safety consequences, not just data loss, and the report ties every Attack Path back to the mitigation it challenges.
What is automotive penetration testing?
Automotive Penetration Testing is a controlled attack on a vehicle’s electronic systems — ECUs, in-vehicle networks, wireless interfaces, and the connected backend — to prove which threats are exploitable and how far an attacker can reach. Unlike a generic IT assessment, it works on real hardware and integration benches, speaks automotive protocols, and produces findings scoped to your Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment so the evidence maps straight into ISO/SAE 21434 and UNECE R155 audit expectations.
Scope
What We Test
An engagement targets the interfaces that carry real risk on your architecture. Scope flexes from a single ECU to a connected platform of 100+ ECUs, but the surface below is where automotive attacks live.
ECU Hardware Interfaces
Physical access is where many chains start. We probe debug and JTAG interfaces, analyse external memory and boot media, attempt firmware extraction, and evaluate the tamper resistance a production attacker would meet — the ground truth for everything above it in the stack.
UDS Diagnostics and In-Vehicle Networks
We test UDS diagnostic services for authentication weaknesses, unsafe routines, and seed-key flaws, then exercise the transport below them — CAN, CAN FD, and Automotive Ethernet — for injection, spoofing, and gateway-filtering bypass across domain boundaries.
Secure Onboard Communication and Boot Chains
We mount Secure Onboard Communication bypass attempts against freshness and MAC handling, and attack the Secure Boot and Secure Flashing chains — key handling, signature verification, and rollback — to test whether the chain of trust actually holds from the Hardware Security Module up.
Telematics, Backend, and Wireless
The remote attack surface — telematics units and their backend connections, plus BLE, Wi-Fi, and cellular interfaces — is where a single flaw becomes a fleet-scale problem. We test the interface, the session, and the trust relationship back to the vehicle, because that is the path a remote attacker actually takes.
Method
How We Work
Every engagement follows the same disciplined arc — threat-model alignment, reconnaissance, exploitation on the bench, and a retest — so findings are reproducible and severity is defensible in front of an assessor. We scope against your architecture and TARA first, so effort concentrates on the Attack Paths that carry consequence rather than a generic sweep.
We publish the full approach — reconnaissance, hardware and protocol analysis, exploitation, and reporting — as an open methodology. Read the full methodology for the step-by-step breakdown before you scope an engagement.
Offering
Fuzz Testing on Integration Benches
Malformed and unexpected inputs find the failures a hand-written test never reaches. We run protocol Fuzz Testing against UDS, DoIP, and SOME/IP on integration benches — instrumented so a hang, reset, or memory fault is caught and traced back to the exact frame that caused it. Findings are reduced to a minimal reproducer and rated for Attack Feasibility, not filed as raw crash logs.
Fuzz Testing runs as a standalone campaign or as one workstream inside a full assessment. See the Fuzz Testing glossary entry for how the technique fits the wider verification picture.
Deliverables
What an Engagement Produces
Each phase produces evidence, not just activity. The table below is the through-line from scope to closure — the artefacts an assessor and your own engineers will both work from.
| Phase | Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|---|
| Scoping and threat-model alignment | Agree targets, interfaces, and rules of engagement; align scope with the programme TARA, Damage Scenarios, and Attack Paths; define the benches and firmware builds under test | Scope statement, test plan, and a TARA-aligned target list |
| Test execution | Hardware interface and firmware analysis, UDS and diagnostic testing, in-vehicle network attacks, Secure Onboard Communication and Secure Boot chain analysis, protocol Fuzz Testing, and exploit development where a path warrants proof | Reproducible attack steps, evidence captures, and tool logs |
| Findings and reporting | Severity rating, attack-path reconstruction, Attack Feasibility input, and remediation guidance per finding | Findings report with attack-path evidence and severity, plus an executive summary |
| Retest | Re-execute against remediated firmware to confirm each fix holds and no regression was introduced | Retest report and closure evidence for the Cybersecurity Case |
Traceability
How Findings Feed the TARA and Cybersecurity Case
A pentest that ends in a PDF nobody reconciles is wasted work. Ours closes the loop. Every confirmed finding is written to update Attack Feasibility in your Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment — an exploited path is empirical evidence that a rating was optimistic, and an interface that resisted a determined attacker is evidence a mitigation works. That reconciliation is exactly what ISO/SAE 21434 Clause 11 verification asks for.
From there, findings and their retest evidence become part of the Cybersecurity Case — the argued, traceable body of evidence a UNECE R155 assessment reviews. See the TARA glossary entry for how the analysis and the test evidence line up.
Engagement models
Three Ways to Engage
Project-Based Assessment
A fixed-scope assessment of a defined target — one ECU, a domain controller, a telematics unit — delivered against milestones with clear rules of engagement, a findings report, and a retest. The right fit for a specific component or a point-in-time check.
Programme-Level Retainer
Continuous testing across a programme, so each firmware release, new interface, or architecture change is retested before it ships. Suits platforms under active development where the attack surface keeps moving between milestones.
Pre-Audit Validation
A focused assessment ahead of a Type Approval milestone, mapped to UNECE R155 Annex 5 and ISO/SAE 21434 Clause 11, so the first hard questions about your evidence come from us, not from the assessor.
Why Agnile
We Build the Stacks We Attack
An attacker who has written a Secure Boot chain, integrated a Hardware Security Module, and shipped a stack finds weaknesses a checklist tester never will — because they know where the shortcuts get taken.
- Independent specialists. Product security testing is a core practice, run by engineers who do automotive work full-time — not a generalist team renting a car-hacking weekend.
- Engineering depth. We build embedded and AUTOSAR Classic and Adaptive security stacks, integrate Hardware Security Modules, and author Secure Boot chains — so we attack from the inside knowledge of how they are actually built.
- Certified operations. Agnile is ISO 9001:2015 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified — testing runs under an audited quality and information-security system, and your firmware is handled accordingly.
- Evidence built for the assessor. Findings are written to feed the TARA and the Cybersecurity Case, mapped to ISO/SAE 21434 Clause 11 and UNECE R155 Annex 5 — not a generic vulnerability list your team has to translate.
Penetration Testing sits inside our wider Automotive Cybersecurity practice, alongside ISO/SAE 21434 consulting — so a test can be a standalone engagement or one part of a programme-wide compliance effort.
FAQ
Automotive Penetration Testing Questions
Scope Your Penetration Test
A short scoping call: bring your target ECU, your bench availability, or your assessment date. We respond to qualified enquiries within one business day.