Supervisor

Suitable for

Abstract

Co-supervised by Systems Security Lab

Our lab built a software-defined radio (SDR) receiver for the HomePlug family of powerline communication (PLC). It can receive messages over a wire -- or even wirelessly -- and has been used to eavesdrop on communications between an electric vehicle and a charger. In its current form, the SDR receiver has been used for security testing of electric vehicles, in academia and by national laboratories. However, the SDR implementation is quite limited at present. There are several clear ways to improve it:

* Integrate the reception layer with standard tools like Wireshark, GNURadio and scapy. * Implement a transmission pathway, to send messages back to the network. This could allow a student to fuzz real implementations and find undisclosed hardware/firmware bugs.  * Performance optimisations to make the implementation real-time and usable on lower-power hardware.

Some research links:  * HomePlug overview : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug  * HomePlug receiver : https://gitlab.com/rbaker/hpgp-emis-rx  * Eavesdropping on vehicle charging : https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentation/baker