Security testing for HRTech, payroll, and people platforms
Continuous testing for products holding employee data across many employers — mapped to GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, with tenant-isolation testing at the centre.
RedStrike is a continuous security testing and cloud posture platform for HR, payroll, and workforce products. It maps findings to GDPR, SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, the OWASP Top 10 (2025), and the OWASP API Security Top 10 (2023). Because HR platforms hold personal data for many employers inside one system, the engine's authorization testing — broken object-level authorization, broken function-level authorization, and mass assignment — carries most of the weight on this use case.
The problem
Why HR data concentrates risk in one place
You hold salary, identity, health, and performance data for every employee of every customer, in one multi-tenant system.
One authorization bug spans every customer
A missing ownership check in a multi-tenant HR product does not leak one record. It leaks a cohort, across employers, with a category of data that is personal by definition.
Special-category data raises the stakes
Health information, union membership, and background-check results attract heavier obligations under GDPR than ordinary personal data, and a breach involving them is not a routine notification.
Roles multiply the paths through the product
Employee, manager, HR admin, finance, and external recruiter each see a different slice. Every additional role multiplies the combinations a test has to cover, and manual testing rarely covers them all.
Buyers audit you because their staff data is at stake
HR buyers ask for SOC 2, a data processing agreement, and evidence of recent testing, because the consequence of your breach lands on their employees.
How RedStrike helps
Authorization testing across roles, not just a crawl
The checks below are registered tools in the scan engine.
Cross-tenant access testing
Object-level authorization checks exercise whether one employer's session can reach another's records, run with real authenticated sessions rather than inferred from response codes.
Role and privilege boundaries
Function-level authorization testing checks whether an employee-level session reaches admin or finance functionality, and whether workflow steps can be skipped.
Over-exposure and mass assignment
Object-property checks find endpoints returning more fields than the role should see, and endpoints accepting fields the role should not be able to set.
API inventory that stays current
Endpoints are discovered from specifications and observed traffic, so the integrations and partner APIs added since the last review are actually tested.
GDPR-mapped findings
Findings carry GDPR references, and AWS resources are audited against the native GDPR benchmark. Azure and GCP are graded against CIS Foundations instead — the table below states this.
Evidence for buyer reviews
Control-mapped reports export in PDF, HTML, JSON, CSV, and SARIF, and evidence can be pushed into Vanta or Drata, so a security review is an export rather than a project.
Compliance coverage
Which frameworks this maps to — and exactly how far the mapping goes
GDPR and SOC 2 have native cloud-resource checks on AWS only; Azure and GCP are graded against CIS Foundations benchmarks. PCI DSS is included because payroll products frequently touch payment flows.
| Framework | Edition mapped | Cloud coverage |
|---|---|---|
| GDPREuropean Union | 2016/679 | Native cloud-resource checks on AWS. Azure and GCP are graded against CIS benchmarks instead. |
| SOC 2AICPA | 2017 | Native cloud-resource checks on AWS. Azure and GCP are graded against CIS benchmarks instead. |
| ISO/IEC 27001ISO/IEC | 2022 | Native cloud-resource checks on AWS. Azure and GCP are graded against CIS benchmarks instead. |
| OWASP Top 10OWASP Foundation | 2025 | Mapped on findings from application, API, and network testing. No native cloud-resource checks — pair with CIS benchmark grading for cloud evidence. |
| OWASP API Security Top 10OWASP Foundation | 2023 | Mapped on findings from application, API, and network testing. No native cloud-resource checks — pair with CIS benchmark grading for cloud evidence. |
| PCI DSSPCI Security Standards Council | 4.0.1 | Native cloud-resource checks on AWS. Azure and GCP are graded against CIS benchmarks instead. |
Every cloud account is graded against CIS Foundations benchmarks on AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes clusters against the CIS Kubernetes benchmark, regardless of which frameworks above apply to you. Evidence can be exported as a report or pushed into Vanta or Drata.
How it works
From connected to evidence in four steps
Define scope
Add the domains, APIs, and cloud accounts in scope, with rules of engagement recorded before any test runs.
Test continuously
Application, API, network, container, and cloud checks run on a schedule instead of once a year, so drift is caught within a scan cycle.
Verify & de-duplicate
Findings from multiple tools are correlated into one issue, evidence is collected, and severity is scored so the list you read is the list that matters.
Export evidence
Results are mapped to framework controls and exported as a report, or pushed into Vanta or Drata.
Outcomes
What changes once this is running
- Test cross-tenant and cross-role access on a schedule instead of hoping code review caught every ownership check.
- Find endpoints over-exposing personal data before a customer's security team does.
- Keep testing aligned with an API surface that changes every sprint.
- Answer buyer security reviews and DPAs from standing, control-mapped evidence.
- Cover GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 from a single scan programme.
Related
Go deeper on the parts that matter to you
Continuous Pentesting
Always-on, verified offensive testing across apps, APIs, and network — not a once-a-year snapshot.
Learn more →Cloud Security (CSPM)
CIS-benchmarked posture across AWS, Azure, and GCP, with drift caught inside a scan cycle.
Learn more →Compliance
How findings become control-mapped audit evidence, and which editions are pinned to your engagement.
Learn more →FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about RedStrike for HRTech.
How does RedStrike test multi-tenant isolation?
Authenticated sessions are established for multiple roles and tenants, then object-level and function-level authorization checks attempt cross-boundary access against discovered endpoints. This is a behavioural test with real sessions, which is why it finds ownership-check gaps that signature-based scanning cannot.
Does RedStrike help with GDPR compliance?
It addresses the security-of-processing side. Findings carry GDPR references, and AWS resources are audited against the native GDPR benchmark covering encryption, access control, logging, and exposure. Lawful basis, data subject rights, retention policy, and transfer mechanisms are governance obligations no scanner can discharge.
Can we test against a staging environment?
Yes, and for intrusive profiles most teams do. Scope, targets, and rules of engagement are recorded before a scan runs, and scan profiles range from a light quick pass to a deep authenticated test.
Is payroll payment data covered?
PCI DSS 4.0.1 is in the framework registry and mapped on the application side, with native PCI checks on AWS resources. If your product stores or transmits card data, that mapping applies alongside the HR-specific coverage.
How are findings prioritized?
Severity is normalized to CVSS across every tool, then weighted by CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities membership and EPSS exploitation probability, and de-duplicated so one issue seen by several tools is one entry.
Do findings integrate with our workflow?
Findings file into Jira and GitHub Issues, including automatic filing rules, and compliance evidence can be pushed to Vanta or Drata.
Prove one customer cannot reach another's people data
Continuous authorization testing mapped to GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001.