Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 175 posts

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#121

Post by cstross »

DangerousPie wrote: post #119
skykooler wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charging or dumping a single powerwall will not damage the grid. However, if someone causes many of them to do so in sync, the current grid control systems are definitely not going to cope well with that sort of behavior.

To do that the attacker would need to connect to hundreds (thousands?) of Powerwalls at the same time and figure out the password for each of them. Which means being close enough to each of them to access the Wifi and also figuring out their serial number somehow. How would they do that?

Not feasible for a single idiot to accomplish, but you're forgetting we live in an age of State-Level Actors who distribute very sophisticated malware to attack enemy nation's infrastructure by borking SCADA controllers in e.g. uranium enrichment plants or petrochemical refineries.

One may hypothesize about the feasibility of a router-targeting worm (similar to the Moon router worm, targeting Linksys kit) that has a payload that searches for nearby PowerWalls and uses its owners's resources to play guess the password. Getting in wouldn't be fast, but over a period of months such a worm could well gain control over thousands to tens of thousands of powerwalls. At which point, a DDoS attack on national-level grid infrastructure is within reach.

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#122

Post by Denvercoder9 »

amluto wrote: post #98
londons_explore wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the solution to this problem is to ban ROCOF protection, and the related phase shift protection, and instead instruct a few big energy producers to transmit a gold code on top of the 50 Hz AC, bandlimited to 48-52Hz and power limited to 0.01% of the system power. Transmitting that code would be easy (cheap) for anyone who does DC/AC conversion with solid state electronics, so that's normally solar, wind far…

Would a better long term fix be to upgrade grid hardware such that it can survive an inadvertent largish island? Sometimes I think that a DC grid would be better. Issues like frequency synchronization wouldn’t exist.

A DC grid is likely better nowadays, but we're stuck with the historic AC grid. Most of the problems DC faced back in the war of currents have been solved by solid state technology.

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#123

Post by FeepingCreature »

londons_explore wrote: post #104
malux85 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t see any difference between an individual switching a multi-kilowatt heater every few milliseconds vs a malicious actor automating this attack on 100,000 properties over an entire state?

But if only the true owner of each powerwall had the ability to control it (when the default password issue is fixed), an attacker can't get correlated control like that.

But if you add a hardware randomizer for switching times, you guard against all software security issues, not just this one.

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#124

Post by unnouinceput »

"The PW can store up to 13.5kW of electric power..." No, you store energy, not electric power, and energy is Wh, that's why you have your phone battery with 5V and 8000 mAh as units and not 8A.

"How does the grid feel about me oscilating this and who will die first, the PW or the sub-station?" Definitely the PW. Sub-stations are made to withstand thousand of households switching all at once their light-bulbs at evening and during storms nature electric discharge (ie, lightning strikes). Your measly PW is fully ignored.

"Do not try any of these Grid Codes (really, please do not):

AU ASS4777.2 DE VDE4105 UK GA59 21A, GA83 16A IT CEI-021 NZ NZS47772 US: IEEE1547 Split Phase 240V 60Hz " I'm a bad boy, I tried them. Nothing happened.

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#125

Post by FeepingCreature »

marvin wrote: post #115
newnewpdro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These issues seem fairly obvious to me. Anyone interested in powerwall vulnerabilities would find them trivially. In this case I think the value is in embarrassing Tesla for their gross negligence so they do better in this area before shipping. When you disclose such things quietly with the vendor, it mostly just saves their face. Not everyone values saving Tesla's face.

It can also give you a five- or six-figure payout and prevent unsuspecting customers of being hit by a disrupting and damaging attack, causing unnecessary economic damage. IMHO, choosing the priority of embarrassing someone rather than give them a 24-hour window of notice to avoid this would be a shitty move. This should be short-term trivially fixable by pushing a password update that sets unique passwords based on…

Not like they couldn't have done that before now.

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#126

Post by jacquesm »

londons_explore wrote: post #56

The only bug here is the default password. After authentication, the fact you can make it charge or dump power into the grid is by design. If I wanted the grid to suffer, I can do this by plugging in and unplugging a multi-kilowatt heater every few milliseconds too. Residential properties have a fuse (usually 60-100Amps), and anything you can do without blowing that fuse won't damage the grid.

> and anything you can do without blowing that fuse won't damage the grid

That's what you'd think. But I have actually done damage to the grid and had that fuse still in one piece. I accidentally connected the -HV line of a neon light installation to ground. After I could see again I realized the power had gone out. I called my boss (landline still worked) who lived more than a kilometer away from the workshop and there too the power had gone out. It turned out my little accident had put a good chunk of the eastern part of Amsterdam out of commission and the fuse was just fine.

Fuses react to current, not to power and when you dump a high enough voltage back into the grid your fuse might not blow before you cause something further upstream to trigger to protect the rest of what's connected.

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#127

Post by fungicide »

marvin wrote: post #114
ncmncm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing. It is all completely plausible, and clearly includes only the most easily explained horrors, with anything that would require explanation just omitted. It is worse than I would have been able to invent.

IMHO, these stories aren’t unexpected from a tech company that grows 80% year over year, developing and expanding as fast as technology and market forces allow. Yes, there are mistakes and unfortunate incidents in the organization of people and tech priorities here, but this is inevitable in an engineering org that moves this fast. You really need to measure this up against Tesla’s achievements: Growing high double d…

Tesla is a car maker, not a tech company. They don't sell Autopilot to other car makers.

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#128

Post by madaxe_again »

jacquesm wrote: post #126
londons_explore wrote: post #56

The only bug here is the default password. After authentication, the fact you can make it charge or dump power into the grid is by design. If I wanted the grid to suffer, I can do this by plugging in and unplugging a multi-kilowatt heater every few milliseconds too. Residential properties have a fuse (usually 60-100Amps), and anything you can do without blowing that fuse won't damage the grid.

> and anything you can do without blowing that fuse won't damage the grid That's what you'd think. But I have actually done damage to the grid and had that fuse still in one piece. I accidentally connected the -HV line of a neon light installation to ground. After I could see again I realized the power had gone out. I called my boss (landline still worked) who lived more than a kilometer away from the workshop and th…

This is exactly what RCDs are for - with a huge earth leak like that (and therefore L/N imbalance) it would have tripped within milliseconds, before cooking the grid.

I am surprised by how infrequently they seem to be used outside of the U.K. - I’ve just rewired my house in Portugal as it was completely unearthed, and just had fuses, no RCDs.

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#129

Post by LifeLiverTransp »

marvin wrote: post #114
ncmncm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing. It is all completely plausible, and clearly includes only the most easily explained horrors, with anything that would require explanation just omitted. It is worse than I would have been able to invent.

IMHO, these stories aren’t unexpected from a tech company that grows 80% year over year, developing and expanding as fast as technology and market forces allow. Yes, there are mistakes and unfortunate incidents in the organization of people and tech priorities here, but this is inevitable in an engineering org that moves this fast. You really need to measure this up against Tesla’s achievements: Growing high double d…

Fanboism that kills is generally frowned upon, by all those who work in majured safety relevant industries. We do hop all the safety hurdles every day, for very good reasons- and to call these proofen right processes slow by someone who lives only because they exist- it has a certain sting to it.

Speedy development is all fun and games, until your luck runs out and you toast a whole highway filled with familys in one afternoon.

After that, nobody is going to hold cheery fanbois liable who enabled this culture. No, it will be engineers, who where forced to make fast decisions. Remember Toyota-Bar - why dont you justify your senseless optimism, in the face of physical danger and accidents, to the victims of sloppy development?

Why is the burden of proof not on you? After all that blood at least should be on your hands.

Re: Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack

#130

Post by Nanzikambe »

rsync wrote: post #77

Is there an alternative to the powerwall that is functionally similar, in terms of power density and utility, but doesn't have things like a network stack and other wifi / IoT / "smart" features ? We are just about to install lithium battery backups in our home and, of course, the Tesla powerwalls are an obvious choice, but I don't look forward to having to disable/reenable the network connectivity on them, manually,…

Yes, I'm in France, I contacted the Italian reseller for this company:

https://www.freedomwon.co.za/

I got this instead of a powerwall because 1) price per kwh 2) tesla will not let you install your own powerwall, you need to go through an installer and attract all those associated costs (which are significant) 3) better integration with a mixed solar equipment install and pv array 4) powerwall does not support an offgrid installation, or at least did not when I looked into it 5) has canbus to a BMS, you're never obligated to connect to the internet

Post reply on HN