Penetration Testing
Identify vulnerabilities in IoT devices and embedded systems to prevent exploitation and secure physical and digital assets.
Discuss an engagementAs IoT adoption and embedded systems continue to expand across industries, hardware vulnerabilities pose an increasing risk to organisations. From consumer IoT devices to industrial control systems (ICS) and custom embedded products, attackers target misconfigurations, weak firmware, and insecure communication channels to gain unauthorised access or disrupt operations.
SilentGrid's Hardware and IoT Penetration Testing evaluates the security of embedded systems, IoT devices, and hardware products to uncover vulnerabilities at the firmware, communication, and physical access layers. Our goal is to ensure your hardware and IoT ecosystems are resilient against attacks that target the intersection of physical and digital security.
We assess IoT ecosystems across the full stack, from firmware analysis and hardware debugging to API security and cloud interaction. This ensures vulnerabilities are identified across all components of the IoT infrastructure.
Our team brings deep knowledge of embedded architectures, reverse engineering, and custom hardware exploitation, allowing us to identify weaknesses at the binary, bootloader, and kernel levels.
SilentGrid simulates real-world attack scenarios targeting IoT ecosystems and hardware devices: firmware reverse engineering and modification, hardware-based attacks (JTAG, UART, SPI, I2C), wireless protocol exploitation (Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa, NFC), and physical tampering and side-channel attacks.
SilentGrid's hardware and IoT testing aligns with leading industry frameworks to ensure comprehensive and rigorous testing:
Addressing the most critical IoT vulnerabilities
Focusing on industrial control system threats
IoT device cybersecurity guidance
Identifying common weaknesses in embedded and IoT software
Our approach evaluates vulnerabilities across the hardware lifecycle, from development to deployment.
IoT and embedded devices often interact with sensitive environments, including critical infrastructure, healthcare, smart cities, and enterprise networks. A single compromised device can facilitate lateral movement within corporate environments, expose sensitive data through insecure storage or transmission, enable remote code execution and persistent backdoors, and lead to operational disruption through attacks on industrial IoT (IIoT) or OT systems.
Ensuring robust hardware and IoT security protects not only device functionality but also the broader network and services they interact with.
Test it again
A single hardware and IoT test covers a device from firmware to the cloud services it talks to. When new firmware ships, a follow-up test confirms the fixes held and checks what changed.
Discuss an engagementSilentGrid's hardware and IoT assessments provide critical insights to product teams, ensuring secure development and deployment of connected devices.
Documenting security risks across firmware, hardware, and communication channels
Demonstrations of successful hardware, firmware, or communication exploits
Detailed recommendations to address vulnerabilities at the hardware, software, and API levels
High-level overview of findings and risks for non-technical stakeholders
Post-assessment support to assist engineering teams in securing hardware products
SilentGrid's consultants are hand-picked, and between them they have delivered penetration testing globally over decades. Their sector experience covers banking and financial services, insurance, government, critical infrastructure and healthcare, so an assessment is read against how the systems in question are actually run.
Consultants find 0-day vulnerabilities in commercial software and speak or teach at security conferences. That research produces the custom tooling used to reach the flaws automated scanning leaves behind, and it keeps the techniques current. Testing follows concepts set out in NIST, OWASP, PTES and OSSTMM.
CREST ANZApproved company Individual credentials across our team include
Hardware and IoT penetration testing examines connected devices the way an attacker with the device in hand would: probing JTAG and UART interfaces, extracting and reverse engineering firmware, attacking Bluetooth, Zigbee, Wi-Fi and MQTT communications, attempting physical tampering and side-channel attacks such as voltage glitching, and testing the cloud services and APIs the device relies on.
The full stack: firmware analysis and hardware debugging, communication and wireless protocols, physical and side-channel attacks, and the cloud services and backend APIs the devices talk to.
Yes. Exposed interfaces such as JTAG and UART are identified, insecure boot configurations assessed, physical tampering used to evaluate access controls and hardware resilience, and voltage glitching, electromagnetic interference and chip-level attacks tested.
Bluetooth, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, MQTT, LoRa and NFC among others, including man-in-the-middle attacks against data flows between devices and cloud platforms.
No. Firmware is extracted and reverse-engineered to identify backdoors, hardcoded credentials and insecure code, and tested for buffer overflows, command injection and privilege escalation opportunities.
The OWASP IoT Top 10, MITRE ATT&CK for ICS, NIST 8259 device cybersecurity guidance, and the Common Weakness Enumeration for embedded and IoT software.
IoT and embedded devices interact with sensitive environments such as critical infrastructure, healthcare, smart cities and enterprise networks. One compromised device can facilitate lateral movement, expose sensitive data, enable remote code execution and persistent backdoors, or disrupt operations on industrial IoT and OT systems.
A vulnerability report covering firmware, hardware and communication channels, proof-of-concept demonstrations, remediation guidance at hardware, software and API levels, an executive summary, and post-assessment consultation for the engineering team.
Secure your IoT ecosystem
Protect your connected devices from evolving threats
Secure your IoT devices and embedded systems from evolving threats.