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How your solar rooftop became a national security issue
Texas solar company EG4 became the poster child for home energy cybersecurity risks this week after federal officials published an advisory detailing how hackers could hijack its inverters.
“You’ve got to have a solar stalker” for this scenario to play out, says Showalter, describing the kind of person who would need to physically show up in your driveway with both the technical know-how and the motivation to hack your home energy system. Not all of his customers – some of whom took to Reddit to complain – are sympathetic, particularly given that CISA’s advisory revealed fundamental design flaws: communication between monitoring applications and inverters that occurred in unencrypted plain text, firmware updates that lacked integrity checks, and rudimentary authentication procedures. Pascale, who works with utility-scale solar installations, notes that residential inverters serve primarily two functions: converting power from direct to alternating current, and facilitating the connection back to the grid.
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