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Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

They can at home (and third-party chargers), but not at Tesla superchargers. The internet access is needed not for charging, but for making a supercharger transaction.

Though I would have personally expected Tesla to set up supercharges in a way that would instead provide free charging when the supercharging internet access is down. The monetary loss from that would probably cost far less than this negative PR. And this is literally the first time I hear about their network going down in a way that supercharging is unavailable (maybe it happened before, but I haven't been paying much attention until 2019), so it isn't like they would be losing tons of money by providing that charging for free. And especially since filling up from around 20% to 90% at a supercharger typically costs me way less (somewhere between $16-26 total) than it would for a gas car.

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I agree with everything you said but if I put my Elon hat on, aside from the itching sensation I can imagine their security team pointed out that people would find ways to DoS the terminal into being free. I'm not saying that would be logical, just probably how they were thinking. I'm taking that hat off now.

> I can imagine their security team pointed out that people would find ways to DoS the terminal into being free.

Yeah, that's definitely a valid concern. I wonder how easy it would be to do so, given I haven't heard of it happening with superchargers before. But again, there was no incentive to do so without free charging, so who knows.

DoSing the terminal to get free charges probably wouldn't be wise, unless you'd use burner cars that aren't traceable back to you.

Totally agree. I would wager some people would not think this through and might even brag about it on TikTok.

You'd also have to consider threat models that include attackers other than Tesla owners trying to get free charges. Eg, Tesla competitors looking to cost them money, people that have twitter beef with Elon, ransom/extortion attacks, teens in it for the lulz, etc.

You always have to consider threat models like these. If you don't, you're not doing your job well.

If you're trying to imply that considering these threat models is a reason not to come up with a proper fail-safe system, then the very same argument applies to creating these charging stations and letting people use them in the first place.

I would assume you can just DDoS either the central cerver or the entire charging location, not individual charging stalls. And in the latter case, who knows which out of many cars present near the charging location did it.

Keep in mind that a lot of supercharger stations are contained within much larger parking lots/garages. More specifically, they are simply just random stretches of parking spots in a garage, but with supercharger stalls installed.

As a real example, 3 closest supercharging stations to where I live are: a large office building multilevel garage, Trader Joe's multilevel garage, and a giant multilevel garage at a mall. Each one can fit bajillion cars (maybe not the trader joe's one, as it only has 2 or 3 floors, with about 25 parking spots on each).

If one of those cars did it once, then well, it's a spare change for you. Doesn't matter if the grand scheme of things.

If one of those cars is involved in its third DoS happening in the last quarter, you may be able to alert the authorities while it's still charging.

You can fail safe with your failsafes. You can react differently based on different kinds of failures. You can put limits to how generous you want your failsafe system to be. You can have an independent killswitch for your failsafe mechanism. You just need to put some effort into designing your system's failure modes.

You may also find out that DoSing the charging station in order to use it for free simply doesn't happen in the wild and that you can safely afford to only react once you notice it actually happening. That's why you pay all these security engineers that are able to reasonably assess these risks, you know.

They could also have the supercharger locally store what car charged how much and when the system goes back up it charges the account. If there is no card on file then it'll be owed until that person connects a card. They could even send out a list of cars to each supercharger as a blocklist if they find abusers to help deter attacks and limit the downside.

TFA: "Some Tesla drivers say they can’t connect to their Powerwall home battery charging system."

Powerwall is just one way to charge at home, and far from the most common one. Electric outlet charging works just fine.

Wait wait wait. You expected Tesla to have pre-emptively done something to avoid negative PR? When have they ever done that?

It is less about having to do something pre-emptively, and more about having good default configs for fail-safes. Approving charging when there is no connection vs. blocking charging when there is no connection is just a bitflip.

Knowing Tesla I expect it's an exception that falls out of the whole charger handshake process.

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