Remotely controlled EV home chargers – the threats and vulnerabilities

[harlan4096]

We are now seeing signs of a possible shift in the field of personal transport. Recent events such as the ‘dieselgate’ scandal undermine customer and government confidence in combustion engines and their environmental safety. At the same time there has been a big step forward in the development of electric vehicles. In addition to favorable media coverage, modern EVs have evolved a lot in terms of battery endurance, driving speeds and interior and exterior design.

To stimulate growth in the personal EV segment some countries even have special tax relief programs for EV owners. But there is still a major problem – the lack of charging infrastructure. This may not be as relevant in big cities, but in other places car owners mostly rely on their own home EV chargers, a relatively new class of device that has attracted our attention.

There are lots of home charger vendors. Some of them, such as ABB or GE, are well-known brands, but some smaller companies have to add ‘bells and whistles’ to their products to attract customers. One of the most obvious and popular options in this respect is remote control of the charging process. But from our point of view this sort of improvement can make chargers an easy target for a variety of attacks. To prove it we decided to take one of them, ChargePoint Home made by ChargePoint, Inc., and conduct some in-depth security research.

ChargePoint Home supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless technologies. The end user can remotely control the charging process with a mobile application available for both iOS and Android platforms. All that’s needed is to register a new account in the application, connect a smartphone to the device via Bluetooth, set the parameters of a Wi-Fi network for an internet connection, and finish the registration process by sending the created user ID and the smartphone’s GPS coordinates to the backend from the device.

Full reading: https://securelist.com/remotely-controll...ies/89251/