As vehicles become increasingly reliant on software, secure and functional Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) are paramount. Unknown vulnerabilities in your automotive software can pose a significant threat to your products and business by putting you at risk of coding errors or insecure configurations, which can be exploited by malicious actors or lead to consequential failures.
Therefore, continuously testing HMS modules is crucial to ensure that functional and security bugs are found long before they make it anywhere near a finished product. In the automotive industry, where undiscovered issues can put human lives at risk or lead to costly callbacks, thorough testing is paramount. Considering the pivotal role of HSMs as the root of trust in communication within a car, if an attacker can take over an HSM, the consequences are dire. Such a breach not only jeopardizes data integrity but also poses a significant threat to vehicle safety and passenger security. Hence, rigorous testing remains the primary defense against these potentially devastating breaches.
At Code Intelligence, we've repeatedly discovered various security issues in HSMs throughout the automotive industry that had slipped through multiple “traditional”, ranging from remote code executions and buffer overflows to heap use after free and segmentation fault.
Challenges in HSM Security Testing
Traditional approaches to HSM security testing can have certain limitations that may prevent them from effectively meeting the international standards established under ISO 21434. Such approaches include:
- Manual Penetration Testing (Pen-Testing)
- Code Reviews
- Security Audits
- Functional Testing
- Acceptance Testing
- Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) Testing
While these traditional methods can identify potential vulnerabilities and ensure that the HSM functions as expected, they have some limitations.
Manual penetration testing and code reviews are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and can be subject to human error, leading to potentially overlooked vulnerabilities. These technologies are primarily conducted manually, and despite their thoroughness, some vulnerabilities may remain undiscovered. Hence, it's crucial to integrate software testing as early as possible in the development cycle to address these shortcomings. This is where fuzzing becomes invaluable. Fuzzing, while not a replacement for other testing methodologies, serves as a complementary approach.
Functional and acceptance testing, while critical to ensuring the system works as intended, often occurs too late in the development cycle. In this case, if major issues are discovered, resolving them can be significantly costly and cause delays.
Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) testing can simulate real-world operating environments, but it's less effective at uncovering software vulnerabilities within the HSM itself.
Additionally, regular security audits provide only a point-in-time snapshot of HSM security, where new vulnerabilities that arise after an audit can remain undiscovered until the next audit takes place.
Finally, these methods often lack scalability and continuous, automated testing capabilities, thus failing to provide complete, ongoing assurances, particularly in today's fast-paced, integrated development environments.
Reliable HSM testing and security
Code Intelligence’s AI-powered fuzz testing performs continuous, automated security and quality tests with every pull request, ensuring vulnerabilities are caught consistently and fixed on the fly.
The platform will dive deep into your HSM, test your code line by line and unveil hidden bugs and vulnerabilities with zero false positives as the development process is ongoing. Using Code Intelligence’s fuzz testing platform you will enable your developers to examine, triage, and fix security issues quickly directly from their favorite IDE/CLI. All uncovered bugs are pinpointed to the exact line of code in the repository and accompanied by inputs that triggered an issue and clear actions to remediate those.
We understand the significance of code coverage as a metric to ensure thorough testing and risk mitigation - that’s why for every project you will see how much of the code was tested.
Cost-effective testing with Code Intelligence
At Code Intelligence, we place a strong emphasis on code coverage as a key metric to ensure comprehensive testing. Our goal is to help you identify blind spots easily and mitigate your risk, maximizing your confidence in the security of your HSM.
We've found that fixing security issues before penetration testing can reduce your security-related costs drastically. Therefore, by empowering developers to find issues early in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) before acceptance testing, Code Intelligence allows you to cut expenses caused by testing inefficiencies experienced through traditional methods.
The requirements for our software testing tool to perform to the best of its abilities are minimal and manageable, designed to ensure you get started easily and quickly as possible. You only need a PC with Linux (x86_64/x86) or MacOS (x86 or ARM64) - with Windows support coming soon. You also need Code Intelligence installed, along with your HSM source code with all dependencies and locally executable unit tests.
Test Your HSM Continuously
Stay secure and reliable by testing your HSM continuously. Our coverage-guided feedback loop will keep testing your HSM routines and communication interfaces for critical vulnerabilities, feeding back the results to refine subsequent tests. You will be protected from memory corruption and other critical vulnerabilities, leaving you to focus on what matters the most - developing the most secure software possible for your business aims.
HSM Security Through AI-Powered Test Cases
With Code Intelligence, you can innovate knowing that your HSM's security is taken care of. We've been proudly rolling out our solutions across the German automotive industry, providing businesses like yours with the tools they need to secure their future.
CI Spark, a built-in AI assistant that leverages large language models (LLMs) and static code analysis, automatically writes thousands of test cases, generates inputs and mocks. This significantly reduces the workload to create tests for any unknown code from several days to under three hours.
Book a demo with Code Intelligence
Interested in securing your HSM and reducing your risk of vulnerabilities? Our team of experts will guide you through our solution, demonstrating how Code intelligence can be an asset to your organization and help you secure your HSM. Book a demo directly with one of our specialists.