Penetration Testing and Red Teaming
Authorized simulated attacks that test defenses in practice, revealing what real adversaries could actually accomplish.
Testing Defenses by Attacking Them
Reasoning about security is not the same as proving it. Penetration testing authorizes skilled testers to attack a system as an adversary would, within agreed rules, to find exploitable weaknesses before real attackers do. It answers a question that documentation cannot: not are we supposed to be secure, but can someone actually get in, and how far.
Penetration Test vs Red Team
- Penetration test: focused assessment of a defined scope, finding as many exploitable flaws as possible
- Red team: goal-oriented, adversary-emulating exercise testing detection and response, not just prevention
- Blue team: the defenders; purple teaming has the two collaborate to improve together
What a Red Team Tests
A red-team exercise emulates a realistic adversary pursuing a specific objective, reaching a critical system, exfiltrating defined data, and measures not only whether they succeed but whether the defenders notice and respond. It stresses people and process, not just technology, revealing gaps in monitoring and incident response that a narrow scan would never surface.
Scope and Safety
On operational and safety-critical systems, live attack testing carries its own risk: a test that disrupts a running process is unacceptable. Such systems are typically tested against representative replicas, digital twins, or test benches, or with carefully bounded, non-disruptive techniques, so the assessment never endangers the real plant.
Fusion Context
Security testing for a fusion program favors representative environments over the live machine, so assessment never risks the process or the safety case. For the Hyperion breeder and burner designs, threat models are validated against test benches and simulation environments during the current design phase, ahead of the Q2 2027 construction start, where weaknesses can be found and fixed without any consequence to real hardware.