Supervisors

Suitable for

Abstract

Our recent research showed that the most-widely adopted Electric Vehicle
(EV) charging standard, known as the Combined Charging System (CCS), is
insecure and vulnerable to attacks, affecting millions of EVs world-wide [1,
2]. An attacker can wirelessly eavesdrop on the communication or inject
their own signals to disrupt it. Because EVs are an integral part of the power
grid and nation critical infrastructure, any attack on them could have serious
consequences, such as blackouts.

In this project, the student will investigate potential countermeasures to
detect and prevent attacks. This will involve extensive testing on real
hardware to evaluate performance under realistic conditions. This may also
involve collaborative experimentation with our industry partners.

Prerequisites

Some familiarity in the area of digital signal processing and with Python.
Knowledge of FPGAs would be an advantage, but is not required.

Useful URLs https://github.com/ssloxford/brokenwire
https://gitlab.com/rbaker/hpgp-emis-rx

References

[1] Baker and Martinovic. "Losing the car keys: Wireless PHY-layer insecurity
in EV charging." USENIX, 2019.

[2] Köhler et al. "Brokenwire: Wireless disruption of ccs electric vehicle
charging." Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium
2023.