Low Energy to High Energy: Hacking nearby EV-chargers over Bluetooth (WHY2025)

During the first Pwn2Own Automotive, organised by ZDI in Tokyo in January 2024, Computest Sector 7 successfully demonstrated exploits for vulnerabilities in three different EV-chargers. All three could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the charger, with the only prerequisite being close enough to connect to Bluetooth. As electric vehicles become increasingly integrated into our transportation infrastructure, the security of their charging systems is becoming paramount. A threat actor hacking EV chargers at scale could have a real life impact on the continuity of our power grid and the transportation sector. Therefore, it is important that manufacturers and operators are well aware of their role in protecting our power grid. During this talk we'll discuss the details on how we extracted the firmware, the vulnerabilities we found and the story of one drunk night of hacking till 07:00 AM in Tokyo that resulted in some much more high-impact vulnerabilities than were needed for the competition... Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/AGVUVM/