Offensive Automotive Cybersecurity: An engineering handbook for exploiting modern automotive platforms

A comprehensive guide to automotive offensive security breaking down real-world exploitation starting from the vehicle backend, through high-performance ECUs down to the edge sensors to bridge the gap between defensive engineering and offensive security techniques.

Key Features

• Understand how security weaknesses throughout the vehicle architecture enable exploitation
• Analyze real-world exploits on vehicle systems to get started with practical vehicle penetration testing
• Design resilient systems by adopting a proactive offensive mindset while applying an AI-enabled secure engineering lifecycle

Book Description

Offensive Automotive Cybersecurity is your practical guide to understanding how modern automotive vulnerabilities are exploited—so you can build resilient defenses against proven attack methods.

As vehicles evolve into software-defined systems, their expanding attack surface increases exposure to sophisticated threats. This book examines the entire connected vehicle ecosystem—from cloud backends and wireless protocols to in-vehicle networks, HPCs, ECUs, and physical sensors—through an offensive security lens.

Through a blend of theory and reviewing practical examples, you will learn to execute the full penetration testing lifecycle, encompassing active and passive reconnaissance, firmware reverse engineering, and the construction of complex attack chains. The book provides hands-on insights into exploiting memory corruption bugs in HPCs, abusing diagnostic protocols, and leveraging hardware-level vulnerabilities such as fault injection and side-channel leakage. These techniques are brought to life through detailed real-world case studies, including remote takeovers and exploits of well-known vehicle platforms.

By the end of this book, you’ll be able to think like an adversary, uncover hidden risks before attackers do, apply secure-by-design principles, and implement layered defenses to reduce exploitable weaknesses.

What you will learn

• Explore the various layers of the vehicle architecture and their exploitable weaknesses
• Deconstruct real-world attack chains and understand attack patterns
• Explore advanced techniques to uncover security weaknesses in your system
• Learn how high-performance ECUs and modern vehicle architectures create new attack surfaces
• Apply Secure by Design principles for building resilient vehicle security that is suitable for real-world threats
• Learn how offensive AI changes attacker economics and why defensive AI restores equilibrium against adversaries

Who this book is for

This book is for cybersecurity professionals, automotive engineers, security testers, and researchers who want to understand and exploit vulnerabilities in modern vehicle systems. If you focus on building defenses but question whether those defenses can withstand real-world attacks, then this book is for you. It is especially valuable for practitioners seeking advanced offensive techniques to better secure their systems against emerging threats. You should have a basic understanding of cybersecurity, embedded systems, and networking concepts.

Table of Contents

1. Offensive Security Basics
2. Penetration Testing Phases
3. Building the Tool Arsenal
4. Attacking the Vehicle Backend
5. Attacking the Wireless Vehicle Systems
6. Attacking the In-Vehicle Communications
7. Attacking MCU-Based Embedded ECUs
8. Attacking the High-Performance ECUs
9. Attacking Vehicle Sensors and AI/ML
10. A Path Forward

Dr. Ahmad MK Nasser is an automotive cybersecurity architect with over 25 years of experience in securing safety-critical systems. He started his career as a software engineer, building automotive network drivers, diagnostics protocols, and flash programming solutions. This naturally led him into the field of automotive cybersecurity, where he designed secure firmware solutions for various microcontrollers and SoCs, defined secure hardware and software architectures of embedded systems, and performed threat analysis of numerous vehicle architectures, ECUs, and smart sensors. His latest work is on securing software in High Performance Computers (HPCs) for software defined vehicles. Ahmad holds a B.S. and an M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Wayne State University, as well as a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan in Dearborn. He is currently a senior manager and the lead security architect of DriveOS, NVIDIA's autonomous driving software platform.

Dr. Dennis Kengo Oka is an automotive cybersecurity executive and strategist with more than 20 years of global experience in the automotive industry, focusing on secure software development and securing next-generation mobility systems. He holds a Ph.D. in automotive security from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Dennis has led cybersecurity initiatives across the automotive product lifecycle, including remote diagnostics and over-the-air update security, and has contributed to industry standards, cybersecurity testing frameworks, and secure engineering practices. He has held senior and global leadership roles with leading automotive and cybersecurity organizations, including Volvo, Bosch Group (ESCRYPT), and Synopsys, and currently serves as Global Technical & Cybersecurity Advisor at IAV. Across these roles, he has supported OEMs and suppliers in advancing secure development practices and scalable cybersecurity architectures for software-defined and connected vehicle platforms. Dennis also serves on the advisory board of Block Harbor. He has authored more than 80 publications, including books and technical papers, and is a frequent invited speaker at international automotive and cybersecurity conferences. His latest books include Building Secure Cars: Assuring the Automotive Software Development Lifecycle (Wiley, 2021) and Building Secure Automotive IoT Applications: Developing Robust IoT Solutions for Next-Gen Automotive Software (Packt, 2024).