Fuzzing Use Case | Automotive Software

5 Drivers of Change in Automotive Software Security

Due to the rapid speed at which the automotive industry is evolving, state-of-the-art application security testing is an absolute precondition to stay competitive. Traditional software testing approaches are insufficient for today’s complexity and provide too much surface for malicious attacks while bearing immense workloads.

Together with our partners within the automotive industry, we identified 5 drivers of change that can help automotive companies secure their software:

1. Risk Mitigation

Cybersecurity needs to become as vital as the brakes. To mitigate risk, it is key to unfailingly detect edge cases and defend against the unknown.

Read article on: Automotive Fuzzing: 3 Steps to Help You Prevent (System) Crashes

2. ISO 21434 Compliance

Car manufacturers and OEMs will need to display Due Diligence when it comes to the security of their software and become ISO/SAE 21434 compliant.

Read Article on: Automotive Software: 6 Tips to Comply With Iso 21434

3. Software Complexity

Traditional software testing approaches such as Unit, Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing cannot cope with interdependent software architecture and requirements.

Read article on: Why You Need Fuzzing for Automotive Machine Learning.

4. Hardware Dependencies

Embedded software in vehicles comes with intricate dependencies that are difficult to test. Fuzzing enables you to reliably find vulnerabilities within these embedded systems.

Read article on: Fuzzing Embedded Systems With Dependencies (for Automotive)

5. Safety & Quality

Safety and quality represent a key to market success within the global automotive industry. Companies with outdated security measures will not be able to survive.

Read article on: 5 Uncomfortable Truths About Automotive Cybersecurity

Why is Fuzzing (Especially) Useful for Security Testing?

There are some characteristics that make fuzzing extremely useful for security testing. Here is why:

Fuzzing is an almost completely automated testing approach.
Fuzzing can be used for black-box AND white-box testing (on the source code).
Fuzzing does not only detect the vulnerabilities but also provides you with the dynamic inputs that caused the error messages.
Fuzzing identifies bugs reliably without false positives.

"Only 1% of all the security tests done for the project where CI Fuzz was used were fuzz tests, but through them, we find about 57% of vulnerabilities.”