Automotive & Mobility
Automotive Cybersecurity
Vehicle cybersecurity engineering to ISO/SAE 21434 and UNECE R155/R156 — TARA, secure boot and HSM integration, SecOC, key management, and ECU-level vulnerability assessment.
Overview
Vehicle security is an engineering discipline, not an IT product
Part of our Automotive & Mobility Engineering practice.
This is not antivirus, firewalls or corporate network security. Automotive cybersecurity is about an ECU with a fifteen-year field life, a constrained microcontroller, a CAN bus with no native authentication, and a regulator who will not grant type approval without evidence.
We work at that level: threat analysis against your actual E/E architecture, cryptographic design that fits the HSM you have, secure boot chains that survive a power loss mid-update, and the work products your OEM's CSMS audit will ask for.
Capabilities
What we deliver
TARA & cybersecurity concept
Item definition, asset identification, threat scenarios, attack path analysis and risk determination per ISO/SAE 21434 Clause 15, leading to cybersecurity goals, claims and a technical concept.
Secure boot & HSM integration
Chain-of-trust design, key provisioning, and integration with EVITA-class HSMs and vendor security peripherals (AURIX HSM, NXP CSEc/HSE, Renesas ICU-M).
SecOC & in-vehicle protection
Secure Onboard Communication configuration, freshness value management, MAC truncation trade-offs, key distribution across ECUs, and intrusion detection (IDPS) sensor placement.
Key & certificate management
Backend PKI design, production key injection at end-of-line, key rotation and revocation strategy, and secure diagnostics authentication (ISO 14229 service 0x29).
ECU vulnerability assessment
Firmware extraction, debug-port and JTAG analysis, bus sniffing and fuzzing, fault injection and glitching, and secure-boot bypass attempts against real hardware.
Regulatory & CSMS support
UNECE R155 cybersecurity management system and R156 software update management system evidence, supplier interface agreements, and type-approval audit preparation.
How we work
A predictable path from first call to handover
No two engagements are identical, but the shape is consistent — so you always know what happens next and what you get at the end of each stage.
Engagement modelsScope the item
We define the item boundary and its interfaces against your E/E architecture, then agree which assets actually carry risk. No generic checklists.
Analyse the threat
TARA workshops with your engineers, producing attack paths, impact ratings and a ranked risk list that drives the concept rather than decorating it.
Design and implement
Cybersecurity requirements allocated to hardware and software, cryptographic design reviewed against the target HSM, and implementation support through integration.
Verify and evidence
Penetration testing on target hardware, requirement-level verification, and a work-product pack structured the way an assessor expects to read it.
Outcomes
What changes for you
- A TARA that reflects your architecture, defensible in an R155 audit.
- Cryptographic design that fits the silicon you already selected, with measured timing impact.
- Findings delivered with a reproduction path and a concrete fix, not just a severity score.
- Cybersecurity work products traceable to the safety and development work products beside them.
Tools & standards
What we work with
- ISO/SAE 21434
- UNECE R155 / R156
- ISO 24089
- AUTOSAR SecOC
- EVITA HSM
- AURIX HSM
- NXP CSEc / HSE
- medini analyze
- Vector vSECC
- CANoe
- Lauterbach TRACE32
- ChipWhisperer
- Binwalk / Ghidra
Questions
Frequently asked
Is this the same as your Enterprise Cybersecurity service?
No, and the distinction matters. This practice covers the vehicle: ECUs, buses, HSMs, type approval. Enterprise Cybersecurity covers your corporate estate — ISO 27001, network and cloud security, staff endpoints. Different standards, different engineers.
We are a tier-one supplier, not an OEM. Does R155 apply to us?
Not directly, but your OEM customer will flow the obligations down through the Cybersecurity Interface Agreement. In practice you carry most of the component-level work products.
Can you test hardware, or only review documents?
We test hardware. Firmware extraction, debug-interface analysis, bus attacks, fuzzing and voltage glitching against real samples are part of the standard scope.
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ExploreLet’s scope your next build.
Tell us what you are trying to ship. We will come back with an approach, a team shape and an honest estimate — we aim to reply within two working days.