One Modem to Brick Them All -Vulns in EV Charging Comms
Jan Berens, Marcell Szakaly
DEF CON 33 (backfill) · Day 1 · Main Stage
This talk, "One Modem to Brick Them All," delivered by Marcell Szakaly from the University of Oxford and Jan Berens from Albertronic, delves into critical security vulnerabilities found within the **Power Line Communication (PLC)** modems used in modern Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure. The speakers expose a widespread issue: the almost universal reliance on just two specific Qualcomm communication chips (QCA7000 and QCA705) across the EV charging ecosystem, many of which run severely outdated and unpatched firmware. Their research reveals fundamental design flaws and implementation oversights that allow for remote denial-of-service attacks, configuration manipulation, and even arbitrary code execution on these crucial components.
AI review
Genuinely novel research hitting critical infrastructure at the physical layer — not another 'EV charging is theoretically insecure' hand-wave, but a full chain from passive survey (697 real chargers, four countries) through remote config wipe to code execution demoed by running Doom on the modem. The ecosystem monoculture finding alone is a policy-level grenade, and the ground terminal attack is something most defenders have never thought about.