Engineers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have discovered a vulnerability in DC fast charging stations that allows hackers to access your electric vehicle.
Let’s explain a little bit: Power line communication (PLC) is a way of sending data over power wires, like an electrical outlet. It works by firing a harmonic signal into the power line and then having a receiver at the other end interpret and extrapolate the data. This way, voice, video, or the Internet can be sent and received directly over your electrical wiring. It sounds novel, but this type of technology has been around since 1922.
A century later, some 40 million electric cars are on the road around the world. Studies show that 86% of owners charge them at home and around 59% use public chargers every week. Those DC sockets, the ones used on the road, are the vulnerable ones. During charging, they use a PLC with a protocol to communicate with the car to monitor faults and collect data (from the state of charge to the vehicle identification number VIN).
SwRI exploited vulnerabilities in the PLC layer that gave it access to the network key and digital addresses of both the chargers and the vehicle through an attack that could mimic both the EV and the charging equipment. “We found that the PLC layer lacked encryption between the vehicle and the chargers,” said Katherine Kozan, principal engineer in SwRI’s High Reliability Systems Department.
In 2020, SwRI managed to hack the most common charging system in the US to disrupt the charging process. They were able to send signals to the car to mimic overcharging, adjust charging rates, or simply block charging altogether.
A Level 3 hack could even inject code into the vehicle’s firmware (the base code that tells the vehicle how to operate) or alter its functions or disable them entirely… even allowing hackers remote access and control through the vehicle’s internet connectivity. This could obviously have serious consequences. The possibilities are almost limitless as modern cars rely heavily on software, CPUs, and internet connections. They are basically data centers on wheels.
The solution
Once you see the evil, you have to remedy it. SwRI has developed a new “zero trust” architecture, which works on the premise that if a bad guy wants to get through your firewall, he’s pretty likely to do so. But it would require every laptop, server or electric vehicle to prove its identity and that it belongs to the network before executing a command.
This system would require each piece of architecture to identify itself at every boot. The zero-trust system then monitors the accuracy of the system and identifies anomalies in real time. This zero-trust architecture is not present in current vehicles, but could be the way of the future if more vulnerabilities are found.
