Charging Into the Cybersecurity Jungle

Charging Into the Cybersecurity Jungle

Cybersecurity has been a fast-developing area of research for electric vehicles and their charging systems, yet boosting cybersecurity in the EV sector has acquired a new urgency in the aftermath of this month’s CrowdStrike blue screen disaster.

The German company ADS-TEC Energy unveiled the first deployment of its ChargeBox DC fast charger at the Marina Palms Yacht Club and Residences in North Miami Beach, Florida. March 19, 2024 (Photo courtesy ADS-TEC Energy)

The spotlight of urgency is on automotive cybersecurity after a July 19, 2024 CrowdStrike update caused a massive information technology outage, crashing 8.5 million Windows systems across the world. Critical services and business operations were disrupted, revealing technology risks that led to outages in healthcare, financial institutions, and airlines. Thousands of flights were canceled worldwide; Delta Airlines is still struggling to return to normal operation as of July 23.

The outage resulted from a faulty update to the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor configuration for Windows systems, intended to enhance security by targeting newly observed malicious activities. But an inadvertent logic error led to the widespread system crashes and blue screens of death.

Cybersecurity has been a fast-developing area of research for electric vehicles and their charging systems, yet boosting cybersecurity in the EV sector has acquired a new urgency in the aftermath of the CrowdStrike disaster.

Southwest Research Institute Exposes Vulnerabilities

Cybersecurity vulnerabilities of electric vehicles that use direct current fast-charging systems have emerged in the newly published research of engineers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas.

“AS THE GRID EVOLVES TO TAKE ON MORE EVs, WE NEED TO DEFEND OUR CRITICAL GRID INFRASTRUCTURE AGAINST CYBERATTACKS WHILE ALSO SECURING PAYMENTS TO CHARGE EVs. OUR RESEARCH FOUND ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENTS.” – Vic Murray, Assistant Director, Southwest Research Institute

A new Pew Research Center analysis released in June found that 64 percent of U.S. adults now live within two miles of a public EV charger, and those who live close to one are more likely to consider purchasing an electric vehicle. Over 95 percent of Americans now live in a county with at least one public EV charging station.

EV nodes such as vehicles, smart chargers and the power grid are targets for cyberattacks. A successful attack can compromise personal information, disrupt charging processes and threaten grid stability.

As an independent, not-for-profit company, SwRI specializes in addressing vulnerabilities and improving cyber resiliency for passenger vehicles. SwRI is helping government and industry to develop transportation systems sector cybersecurity standards and solutions to meet the demands of current and future mobility.

Direct current fast-charging systems are the quickest, most popular way to charge electric vehicles. DC fast chargers, also called Level 3 chargers, typically provide charging through a high-voltage 480-volt input and requires a special socket in electric vehicles to handle CCS/CHAdeMO charging connectors.

CCS connectors allow automakers to fit only one charging port, which can accept both AC and DC charging. With CHAdeMO, EV drivers require a separate charging port for AC, resulting in two charging ports on the vehicle.

Depending on your vehicle, DC fast-charging stations can provide an 80 percent charge in less than an hour by converting AC, alternating current, to DC, direct current.

This high-voltage system relies on power line communication technology (PLC) to transmit smart-grid data between electric vehicles and charging equipment.

In an exploratory spirit, the SwRI team took over a lab and exploited vulnerabilities in the power line communication layer to see what they would find.

The scientists were able to gain access to network keys and digital addresses on both the DC fast charger and the electric vehicle.

“Through our penetration testing, we found that the PLC layer was poorly secured and lacked encryption between the vehicle and the chargers,” said Katherine Kozan, an engineer who led the project for SwRI’s High Reliability Systems Department.

The testing team found unsecure key generation present on older computer chips, an issue confirmed through online research to be a known concern. A key generator is a computer program that generates a product licensing key, such as a serial number, needed to activate a software application.

The research is part of SwRI’s ongoing efforts to help the mobility sector and government improve automotive cybersecurity spanning embedded automotive computers and smart-grid infrastructure.

This year’s research builds upon a 2020 project where SwRI hacked a J1772 charger, the most common interface for managing EV charging in North America, disrupting the charging process with a lab-built spoofing device.

Simulating a malicious attack as part of an automotive cybersecurity research initiative, the SwRI team reverse-engineered the signals and circuits on an EV and a J1772 charger and successfully disrupted vehicle charging with a spoofing device developed in the lab using low-cost hardware and software.

“This was an initiative designed to identify potential threats in common charging hardware as we prepare for widespread adoption of electric vehicles in the coming decade,” Austin Dodson, the SwRI engineer who led the research, said.

In its latest project, SwRI explored vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging technologies governed by ISO 15118 specifications for communications between EVs and electric vehicle supply equipment to support electric power transfer.

Evesdropping With an Adversary-in-the-Middle

An Adversary-in-the-Middle (AitM) attack is a form of data eavesdropping and theft that occurs when an attacker intercepts data from a sender to the recipient, and then from the recipient back to the sender. It’s called adversary in the middle because the attacker’s device sits between the sender and recipient and relays messages silently without making either party aware of the eavesdropping.

Using an AiTM, an attacker can obtain passwords, personally identifiable information, intellectual property, private messages and trade secrets. In advanced attacks, the attacker can potentially install malware on a targeted user’s device.

The SwRI team developed an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) device with specialized software and a modified combined charging system interface.

The AitM allowed testing engineers to eavesdrop on traffic between EVs and electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) for data collection, analysis and potential attack. EVSEs are also known as charging stations, charging docks, EV chargers, or charge points.

By ascertaining the media access control addresses of the EV and EVSE, the team identified the network membership key that allows devices to join a network and monitor traffic.

“Adding encryption to the network membership key would be an important first step in securing the V2G charging process,” said FJ Olugbodi, an SwRI engineer who contributed to the project.

“With network access granted by unsecure direct access keys, the nonvolatile memory regions on PLC-enabled devices could be easily retrieved and reprogrammed. This opens the door to destructive attacks such as firmware corruption,” Olugbodi explained.

Trusting Zero Trust Architecture

In this cybersecurity jungle, encrypting embedded systems on electric vehicles poses challenges. For instance, added layers of encryption and authentication could become a safety hazard. A failure to authenticate or decrypt could interrupt a vehicle’s functionality or performance.

SwRI has developed a zero-trust architecture that can address these and other challenges by connecting several embedded systems using a single cybersecurity protocol.

Zero-trust architecture utilizes a security model, a set of system design principles, and a coordinated cybersecurity and system management strategy based on an acknowledgement that threats exist both inside and outside traditional network boundaries.

“The zero trust security model eliminates implicit trust in any one element, component, node, or service and instead requires continuous verification of the operational picture via real-time information from multiple sources to determine access and other system responses,” according to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST.

SwRI’s future EV cybersecurity research will test zero-trust systems for power line communication technology and other network layers.

Automakers and the DC Fast Charging Challenge

In June 2023, seven major automakers created a new charging network of more than 30,000 chargers across North America, to be rolled out this year along major highways and in cities.

BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis created a joint venture to expand fast-charging sites in the United States and Canada.

Called the Ionna network, the new group is based in Durham, North Carolina, and added Toyota in July 2024. Their fast chargers will be accessible to drivers of EVs equipped with Tesla’s North America Charging Standard or Combined Charging System ports, and the company intends to power the charging stations with renewable energy.

“NORTH AMERICA IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST IMPORTANT CAR MARKETS, WITH THE POTENTIAL TO BE A LEADER IN ELECTROMOBILITY. ACCESSIBILITY TO HIGH-SPEED CHARGING IS ONE OF THE KEY ENABLERS TO ACCELERATE THIS TRANSITION. THEREFORE, SEVEN AUTOMAKERS ARE FORMING THIS JOINT VENTURE WITH THE GOAL OF CREATING A POSITIVE CHARGING EXPERIENCE FOR EV CONSUMERS.” – Oliver Zipse, BMW Group CEO

More DC fast chargers mean a greater risk of cybersecurity breaches, but Cameron Mott, SwRI’s cybersecurity manager, is determined to strengthen cybersecurity for EV fast charging. “Automotive cybersecurity poses many layers of complexity,” he said, “but we are excited about these new techniques to identify and address vulnerabilities.”

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