BadPower attack can destroy your smartphone

Researchers from Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab discovered that fast charging solutions can be hacked to turn them into phone-killing devices. As mobile devices became more widely used, and started using more power, the need arose to charge devices faster.

Modern charges pump a lot more energy into your battery in a shorter amount of time as people want to use their phone all day long without having to suffer through hours-long recharging periods.

Fast chargers contain chips used to regulate the power delivery and the researchers discovered that an infected device can overwrite the firmware of the charger to turn it into a device-killing menace.

Xuanwu Lab tested a total of 35 fast chargers and found that 18 models from eight different vendors are susceptible to their "BadPower" attack. All vendors got notified but the researchers note that not all vulnerable chargers can be fixed.

BadPower interferes with the output to deliver more power than the connected device can accept, which can be extremely high for the latest chargers. For example, 100W USB-PD chargers are becoming increasingly common, and Oppo recently announced a 125W system. The firmware in these chargers is supposed to negotiate the correct combination of voltage and current to charge a connected device at maximum speed, which can be as high as 20V and 5A for power delivery. Plenty of new smartphones can only handle 15 or 18W, so you can imagine what 100W of power will do to the internals.

More details at ExtremeTech.