OUR story

01

Task

The client’s infotainment system integrated a central SoC with OTP memory, available only from the Trusted Zone. The primary task was to create a secure and reliable mechanism to leverage this OTP memory for two essential purposes:

1. Storing the unique ECU identifier (FAZIT ID) and

2. Enabling anti-rollback protection.

The solution had to address the hardware limitations of OTP memory. It was essential to guarantee safe read and write operations. At the same time, the integrity of version management had to be preserved. All of this needed to be achieved without risking irreversible damage to the ECU. Additionally, it demanded adaptability for integration into the customer’s infotainment SDK while aligning with strict automotive cybersecurity mandates.

02

Challenge

Delivering such solution for OTP memory posed significant implementation limitations. Its highly hardware-specific nature made reuse across platforms complex. Further, any incorrect write could permanently damage the ECU, making testing extremely risky. With limited access to production hardware and each test consuming OTP space irreversibly, the risk of rendering ECUs unusable was high.

The challenge was to design a solution that can:

• Securely control OTP access,

• Enable robust validation, and

• Allow exhaustive testing cycles

This was supposed to be implemented without wasting valuable production hardware all while maintaining compliance with automotive security standards and performance constraints.

03

Solution

With years of experience and expertise in Trusted Application development our team devised a lightweight Trusted Application that mediated all OTP access within the TEE. This ensured only authorized and validated operations could be executed, preventing both unauthorized access and accidental overwrites.

To overcome hardware risks, OP-TEE with QEMU was used to emulate the target environment, allowing extensive virtualized testing and debugging. Automated test suites were integrated into the workflow to validate every code change for stability and consistency. Only after achieving high confidence through virtualization did the team conduct limited validations on actual ECUs, minimizing waste and safeguarding production hardware.

04

Successes

The project successfully delivered a production-ready Trusted Application that became part of the customer’s infotainment platform SDK. It provided secure storage of immutable ECU identifiers and robust anti-rollback protection, directly strengthening platform integrity. Despite its compact scope, the solution addressed critical security requirements and protected against common attack scenarios targeting software rollback and unauthorized hardware manipulation.