Cyber Security Testing
Hardware Security Penetration Testing
Physical interface, firmware extraction and side-channel assessment of embedded devices.
Every engagement includes manual validation, a two audience report and free re-testing.
Get a scoped quote+91 96682 00222What this actually is
If someone can hold your device, they will eventually get inside it. Debug headers left on the board, firmware readable straight off the flash chip, keys stored in plaintext because the hardware was assumed to be physically safe.
We test the device the way a competitor or a criminal would, given a few hours in a workshop. Extract the firmware, find the debug interfaces, watch what talks to what on the board, and see what falls out.
This matters most for anything deployed in the field. Payment terminals, meters, medical devices, kiosks and industrial controllers, where physical access is never guaranteed to be your access.
What we go after
- Physical teardown and interface identification
- UART, JTAG and SWD debug interface access
- Firmware extraction from flash and secure boot review
- Hardcoded credentials, keys and certificates in firmware
- Bus sniffing across SPI, I2C and internal communications
- Tamper resistance and physical protection assessment
- Side-channel exposure where relevant
How we run it
- 01
Scope and authorise
Targets, testing windows, escalation contacts and safety limits, all agreed in writing before anyone touches anything.
- 02
Map the surface
We enumerate what is actually exposed, which is usually more than the asset register says.
- 03
Test by hand
Tooling gives coverage, our engineers give proof. Every finding is reproduced before it is written down.
- 04
Report
An executive narrative your board can act on, and a technical annexe with the exact request, payload and fix.
- 05
Re-test and sign off
Once you have fixed it we verify each one at no extra cost, then close the engagement properly.
What you receive
- Teardown report with annotated board photography
- Extracted firmware analysis and secrets inventory
- Attack narrative from physical access to compromise
- Hardware and firmware hardening recommendations
Who needs this
Device manufacturers, payment terminal operators, utilities deploying smart meters, and anyone whose hardware sits somewhere a stranger can reach it.
How long it takes
Two to four weeks per device family.
Standards this satisfies
- OWASP IoT
- IEC 62443
- STQC
- Common Criteria concepts
Why it matters
Testing exists to answer a question somebody outside your team is asking: a customer, an insurer, a regulator, or a board that wants to know whether the money spent on security bought anything. A scan report does not answer it. A test that names what was verified, to what depth and against which standard does.
The second reason is more practical. Controls decay. Configurations drift, integrations get added under deadline, and the environment you tested last year is not the one running today. Testing is how you find out which of your assumptions stopped being true.
Choose the depth you actually need
Most of the price difference between quotes comes down to this one choice, and it is rarely explained. Pick one to see what it covers, what it suits and what it costs you.
You give us working accounts at each privilege level and a short walkthrough. We then test what a real attacker reaches after the first stolen password, which is where the findings that matter almost always live. This is what we recommend for most engagements.
Choose this when
- Any application with authenticated functionality
- Multi-tenant products, where tenant isolation is the real risk
- Getting the most findings for the money
Effort and cost
Moderate effort and by far the best coverage per rupee. Most of the serious findings we report come out of authenticated testing rather than unauthenticated.
Assessed against IEC 62443
Industrial testing is scoped to the zone and conduit model in IEC 62443, with findings mapped to a target security level per zone. That lets you prioritise by consequence rather than by CVSS score, which means very little on a plant floor.
Scope it yourself, before you call anyone
Answer a few questions and you get an indicative number, the working behind it and what your answers tell us. It runs in your browser, so nothing you type reaches us.
What needs testing?
Pick everything in scope. Effort is driven by unique functionality, not by how many IP addresses you own.
What we look for, and keep finding
These are the classes of problem this work exists to surface. Not every engagement finds all of them, but these are the ones that turn up often enough to be worth naming.
IT to OT boundary failure
The route every published industrial attack has used. We map every path from the corporate network into the control environment, including the ones created for projects and left in place.
Unauthenticated industrial protocols
Modbus, DNP3 and their relatives assume a trusted network. Anyone who reaches the segment can often issue commands, which makes segmentation the primary control rather than a secondary one.
Vendor remote access
Permanent tunnels with shared credentials and no logging, established so a supplier can maintain their equipment. The supplier's security posture silently becomes yours.
Unpatchable legacy assets
Devices that cannot be updated without invalidating certification. The finding is not the missing patch, it is whether the compensating isolation actually holds when tested.
Firmware and physical interfaces
Debug ports, unsigned firmware and extractable secrets on devices sitting in places no one supervises. We assess these in a lab rather than on a live line.
Who runs your engagement
A senior tester, named before you sign
Testing is led by an engineer holding OSCP, CREST or equivalent, and you are told who it is before the engagement starts. They write the report themselves rather than handing notes to someone else, and they are on the call when findings are walked through. If the person changes, we tell you why.
Questions we get asked
Will you destroy the device?
Possibly. We ask for two or three samples and treat one as expendable. Destructive analysis is sometimes the only way to answer the question honestly.
Do you need schematics?
They help and speed things up, but we work without them by default, because an attacker will not have them either.
Often scoped alongside
- Web Application Security TestingOWASP-aligned manual and automated testing of web applications, with validated proof-of-concept for every finding.Read more
- Mobile Apps Security TestingAndroid and iOS binary, runtime and API-layer assessment against OWASP MASVS.Read more
- Network Penetration TestingInternal and external network exploitation, lateral movement and privilege escalation testing.Read more
- API Security TestingAuthentication, authorisation, rate-limiting and business-logic testing across REST, GraphQL and gRPC.Read more
Ready to scope your hardware security penetration testing?
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer, and you leave with a written scope and indicative effort.