In recent years, the CYD Campus and other researchers have found several critical vulnerabilities in the powerline communication (PLC) system used in a wide array of infrastructure from electric vehicles, private homes to industrial automation.

The goal of this project is to extend the state of the art attacks, such as Brokenwire [1] and Eavesdropping attacks [2] and build a cost-effective off-the-shelf wireless PLC sniffer. This sniffer will then be used to conduct security analyses of specific PLC deployments (such as the CYD Campus domotics laboratory) as well as a large-scale study of the state of the PLC infrastructure.

Required Skills:

  • Signal processing
  • Pro­gramming in Py­thon/C
  • Some fa­mi­li­a­ri­ty with software-defined radio

[1] Brokenwire: Wireless disruption of CCS electric vehicle charging S Köhler, R Baker, M Strohmeier, I Martinovic The 30th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2023 https://brokenwire.fail

[2] Losing the car keys: Wireless phy-layer insecurity in {EV} charging R Baker, I Martinovic 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 19), 407-424