Tag Archive for: electric

ORNL targets electric grid security, EV battery charging

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are taking innovative steps to meet energy challenges of national interest.

Richard Raines, director of the Electrification and Energy Infrastructures Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, takes U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm, right, on a tour of GRID-C at ORNL's Hardin Valley campus in Knoxville, Tenn., on Monday, Nov. 22, 2021. Raines recently spoke to a Friends of ORNL audience about electric vehicles, batteries and more.
In November 2021, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm (beige coat, lower left corner) visited ORNL’s Grid Research Integration and Deployment Center (GRID-C) and learned about its building-to-grid and vehicle-to-grid research from ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia (bottom) and Richard Raines, director of ORNL’s Electrification and Energy Infrastructures Division, which has 150 staff, mostly engineers.

They are addressing the following questions.

How can the efficiency and resilience of the U.S. electric grid be improved? Can the grid be better protected from weather-related outages and cyberattacks?

Can American batteries be manufactured using materials from domestic rather than foreign sources? Can they be recharged faster? And, can spent batteries and their materials be reused, recycled and kept out of landfills to protect the environment?

Rick Raines speaks to Friends of ORNL via Zoom on ORNL research on electric grid resilience and security and on the manufacture, charging and recycling of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and the grid.

Can high-power battery charging technology be embedded in parts of interstate highways so potential consumers of electric vehicles (EVs) will be less concerned about driving range and the availability of battery recharging stations?

In a recent talk to Friends of ORNL, Richard A. Raines, director of ORNL’s Electrification and Energy Infrastructures Division, said, “We are making a difference. We are developing capabilities in the lab that are being field tested.”

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New Flaws Expose EVlink Electric Vehicle Charging Stations to Remote Hacking

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Schneider Electric has patched several new vulnerabilities that expose its EVlink electric vehicle charging stations to remote hacker attacks.

Schneider announced the availability of patches on December 14, when it urged customers to immediately apply patches or mitigations. The flaws have been found to impact EVlink City (EVC1S22P4 and EVC1S7P4), Parking (EVW2, EVF2 and EVP2PE) and Smart Wallbox (EVB1A) devices, as well as some products that have reached end of life.

The vendor has credited researcher Tony Nasr for finding a total of seven vulnerabilities in these charging stations, including one critical and five high-severity issues.

The security holes include cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and cross-site scripting (XSS) bugs that can be exploited to carry out actions on behalf of a legitimate user, and a weakness that can be leveraged to gain access to a charging station’s web interface via brute-force attacks. The most serious issue — based on its CVSS score of 9.3 — is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability.

EVlink electric vehicle charging station vulnerabilitiesSchneider warned that failure to take action could lead to “tampering and compromise of the charging station’s settings and accounts.”

“Such tampering could lead to things like denial of service attacks, which could result in unauthorized use of the charging station, service interruptions, failure to send charging data records to the supervision system and the modification and disclosure of the charging station’s configuration,” the industrial giant wrote in its advisory.

The company noted that exploitation of the vulnerabilities requires physical access to the system’s internal communication port, but admitted that attacks can also be launched from the local network and even the internet if the charging station is accessible from the web.

“The exploitation of Internet-connected charging stations does not require having access to the LAN, therefore making the attack vector very powerful and effective,” Nasr told SecurityWeek. “In this case, the adversary would perform Internet-wide scans to search for viable EVCS [electric vehicle charging stations] before attempting to exploit their vulnerabilities. However, it should be noted…

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Hack the Plant Episode 16: Cyber Challenges to Securing Our Electric System

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“Initially it was looking at specific types of attacks and thinking how those could be utilized against our systems, but then it became more sophisticated in thinking of how these attacks could be coordinated together by larger actors? ….  I think that regulation’s role is more to draw attention and provide you with a base minimum, and then from there, it’s the responsibility of those industries of those actors to step up and design the systems and implement true security.” – David Coher

How can our electrical grid system anticipate cybersecurity attacks? What is the nature of its vulnerability to attack, and what role can regulation play in securing our future?

In this episode, we hear from David Coher, leader of Southern California Edison’s (SCE) Energy Contract Management team, which manages their long-term energy procurement contracts (approximately $4 billion, annually). David is an attorney, who moved from real estate litigation to SCE where he established programs for cybersecurity, participation in California’s Greenhouse Gas emissions Cap & Trade market, and Dodd-Frank compliance.

We discussed how the power grid works and the changing landscape of keeping our energy grids safe from cyber attacks. We also explored the challenges of establishing a regulatory compliance program – in particular how to anticipate cybersecurity threats.

What is next for SCE? What are some potential opportunities and threats on the horizon for the safety of our electric grid? Join us to learn more.

(Subscribe to Hack the Plant on Spotify or Apple, by RSS feed or search for it wherever you listen to podcasts.)

DISCLAIMER: “The opinions expressed by David Coher are his own and do not necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of Southern California Edison, its parent company Edison International, or any of their affiliates.”

TRANSCRIPT

Joshua Corman: 

Our dependence on connected technology is growing faster than our ability to secure it, especially in areas affecting public safety and human life.

Bryson Bort: 

I’m Bryson Bort. And this is Hack the Plant. Electricity, finance, transportation, our water supply. We take these critical…

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How Home Electric Car Charging Works | US News & World Report – U.S. News & World Report

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How Home Electric Car Charging Works | US News & World Report  U.S. News & World Report
“Don’t Plug Your Phone into a Charger You Don’t Own” – read more