Six electric vehicle chargers are all an attacker needs to destabilize an entire suburban power grid.
Cyber-security for EVs usually focuses on protecting the car's software or the owner's credit card. This research proves that falsifying the data coming from just a handful of chargers can trick the grid into a demand response failure. The electrical grid relies on this telemetry to balance supply and demand in real-time. By sending fake signals, an attacker can trigger a local blackout or damage high-voltage equipment. This vulnerability exists because the communication protocols used by chargers were not designed for high-stakes grid stability. The transition to green energy is creating massive, invisible targets for anyone looking to cause physical infrastructure chaos.
Man-in-the-Middle Exploitation and Grid-Level Impact Quantification of OCPP Telemetry Falsification in EV Charging Infrastructure
SSRN · 6721328
The proliferation of networked electric vehicle (EV) charging stations integrated with utility grid control systems introduces cyber-physical attack surfaces whose consequences extend far beyond individual devices. This paper presents an empirical analysis investigating how protocol-level vulnerabilities in Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) implementations enabletelemetry falsification with quantifiable downstream impact on Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and Automated D