Penetration testing is a process that an automaker or a Tier 1 supplier will go through
to verify the security of a component or a vehicle.
That vehicle or that component will have somebody creatively trying to circumvent
the mitigations that are put in place to prevent unauthorized access
to that component or that subsystem of the vehicle.
Functional safety and automotive cybersecurity both use the automotive V-model.
They both use the automotive V-model in a similar way in that on the left side of that V-model,
you are designing in mitigations to prevent something bad from happening,
and then on the right side of that V-model, you are testing to verify
that those mitigations are in place and functional.
With functional safety, you only have to run through that sequence once.
The brakes on your car, they do not change
from the time that they are designed to the time that you are using them.
Cybersecurity, on the other hand, is an ever-changing landscape.
New threats are popping up,
software updates are introducing potentially new vulnerabilities,
and every time you introduce that potential new vulnerability,
you have to test to verify that that vulnerability is still secure in your vehicle.
In the automotive V-model, when you look at penetration testing,
penetration testing is something that you do to verify
that a system is not easily hackable.
What we are really looking at is verification and validation testing.
Verification and validation testing, what you are looking at
is you are looking at verifying that those mitigations that you have in place
are still in place after a software update,
they are still in place after something changed, after a new threat emerged.
As part of that iterative process of testing the vehicle or the vehicle's subcomponents
after a new threat is introduced or after you have introduced some kind of software update,
automation and regression testing is key.
Regression testing is looking at all of the things that you have already tested
and verifying that those tests are still applicable in the ever-changing landscape.
The automation piece is a way that you can incorporate that regression testing,
work that you have already done, in a way that is easy to do
and it does not require a guide to do the same test day after day, update after update.
Having a database of threats and controls is a way that automakers and Tier 1 suppliers
can look at what has already been done in the realm of cybercrime.
Cybercriminals are intelligent individuals.
They understand that a lot of the things that they want to do has already been done before,
and so they will go to these types of repositories
and they will find ways to use that to break into a vehicle.
The automaker and the Tier 1 supplier, having already verified
that those types of repositories are secured against,
makes it that much more difficult for the cybercriminal
to have an effect on their bottom line.
Verification and validation testing
is one of the most important aspects of a cybersecurity management system,
and it is something that, as we have discussed already, is an iterative process.
Being able to iterate that in some kind of way that does not involve a human being,
having an automation platform that is capable of testing
against the vulnerabilities that you already know about,
the vulnerabilities that you have already tested against,
on an update-by-update basis,
is crucial to having an effective cybersecurity management system.
As cars become more and more electronically controlled,
a vehicle test bench is something that we are seeing being used in the industry today.
A vehicle test bench has all of the electronics control units,
telematics control units, and networks that exist within a vehicle
in a compact environment.
The biggest thing that the vehicle test bench provides
that a full-size vehicle does not provide is a way to do testing in a small space.
When we talk about stuff like type approval
and having type approval for the different levels of car,
as your car's trim level goes up, its vehicle type might change.
Using a test bench, we can test against cyber threats
without having the full vehicle available at any given time.