Demo: Ransom Vehicle through Charging Pile

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.

Publication
In Proceedings of the 2023 Inaugural Symposium on Vehicle Security and Privacy. San Diego, California, Feburary 27, 2023. (Acceptance rate: 32/83=36.0% (overall), 20/49=40.8% (regular), 2/6=33.3% (short), 6/16=37.5% (wpi), and 4/12=33.3% (demons/posters)

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
Xiang Li
Ph.D. Candidate in Cyberspace Security (Tsinghua University)

Xiang Li is a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Network Science and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University, advised by Professors Qi Li and Haixin Duan. He belongs to the Network and Information Security Lab (NISL). He is a visiting scholar at UC Irvine as a project specialist, working with Professor Zhou Li. He is also working as a security research intern at Qi-An-Xin Technology Company. Additionally, he is the author of the fast IPv6 network device scanner XMap, open-sourced on GitHub. His research interests include network security, protocol security, IPv6 security, DNS security, Internet measurement, and network & protocol fuzzing. As the first author, he has published many research papers at top security conferences like USENIX Security, NDSS, and DSN. As the co-author, he also published multiple papers in top conferences like USENIX Security and SIGMETRICS. He also gets his presentations accepted by top industry security conferences like Black Hat. He likes to attend talks and workshops like IDS, OARC, and VehicleSec to share his research. He has obtained over 140 CVE/CNVD vulnerability numbers for a variety of influential IPv6 and DNS vulnerabilities, which have impacted over 20 home router vendors and all DNS implementations and resolver vendors. He received acknowledgements and more than $10,600 rewards from those vendors, like Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Akamai, and is working for the improvement of DNS protocols (related work has been referenced in RFC).