Abstract
Ransom attacks have attracted widespread attention from researchers, however, there have been relatively few researches on vehicles, especially for electric vehicles (EVs). Such attacks mainly accomplish their purpose by exploiting vulnerabilities of vehicle itself, but often have a narrow attack surface. In this demo with real EVs and public charging piles, we show a new approach, the Charging Pile Ransom Attack (CPRA), that can remotely ransom EVs through the charging connector between EVs and charging piles. Additionally, we design a physical plugin for charging connectors that can extend the EV models affected by the described ransom attack. In this case, the CPRA needs a preparing step to locally install the plugin on the connector.
Overview
In this demo with real EVs and public charging piles, we show a new approach, the Charging Pile Ransom Attack (CPRA), that can remotely ransom EVs through the charging connector between EVs and charging piles.
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Xiang Li
Associate Professor (Nankai University)
Xiang Li is an Associate Professor at the College of Cyber Science, Nankai University. He is the advisor of Nankai University’s CTF teams, an ACM member, CCF member, and CIC member. He serves as PC for top-tier venues like IMC 2025 and others like AsiaCCS 2025. His research interests include network security, protocol security, IPv6 security, DNS security, Internet measurement, network & protocol fuzzing, network vulnerability discovery & attack, web security, and underground economy with 18 research papers. As the first author, he has published many research papers at all top-tier security conferences, including Oakland S&P, USENIX Security, CCS, NDSS, and Black Hat (Asia, USA, and Europe). He applied for 11 patents (1 authorized and 5 in checking as the first author). He has obtained over 200 CVE/CNVD/CNNVD vulnerability numbers, more than $11,600 rewards, 370+ GitHub stars, multiple CERT reports, 100+ news coverage, and RFC acknowledgement. He got multiple prizes, such as 2024 ACM SIGSAC China Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2024 Pwnie Award Nominations (Hacker Oscar), 1st prize of IPv6 Technology Application Innovation Competition, 2nd prize of GeekCon 2023 DAF Contest, National Scholarship, Wang Dazhong Scholarship, Tsinghua Outstanding Scholarship, Outstanding Graduate, and Extraordinary Hacker of GeekCon International 2024.