Prague, October 2026. Many power converters now talk to a cloud, receive firmware over the air and are serviced by technicians who connect remotely or on site. This is convenient. However, it raises a question: who is allowed to change the software of a device that controls electrical energy, and how does the device know?
In Moore4Power, i46 will work on this question. This article explains why it matters and what we will do.
What goes wrong when remote access is weak
Two public cases illustrate different aspects of the problem.
The first case concerns the devices themselves. Forescout Vedere Labs published its SUN:DOWN research on solar power systems. The team reported 46 new vulnerabilities and catalogued 93 known ones. Of the known vulnerabilities, 80 percent are rated high or critical. Forescout linked flaws in systems from three vendors (Sungrow, SMA and Growatt) to the possibility that attackers tamper with inverter configurations, which could lead to grid instability.
The second case concerns dependence on remote connectivity. On 24 February 2022, a cyberattack on the KA-SAT satellite network disrupted satellite communications. As a result, about 5,800 Enercon wind turbines with more than 10 GW of installed capacity lost remote monitoring and maintenance. The attack targeted the communication network, and it shows how much of today's operation relies on a remote channel.
Together, the two cases show that the remote channel is part of the product. It needs the same engineering care as the power stage.
What i46 will do
Moore4Power includes a topic on trust and security. Within it, i46 will lead the development of a framework for strong authentication of offline devices. The work has two parts:
- Technician access: a technician who services a device on site or remotely will prove authorisation in a way that the device can check without trusting the network.
- OTA authorisation: the device will accept a software update only if the authorisation passes the same check.
The project plan describes three results that i46 will aim to deliver by the end of the project:
- Highly secured remote access to IoT devices: a system and method for secure software updates, covering both OTA updates and on-site physical updates. Both will be secured with quantum-resistant methods integrated with the device's secure element.
- Highly secured IoT-to-cloud communication: a method for sending sensitive data from a device to the cloud with asymmetric encryption, in which the private key of the device's secure element is never exposed.
- Multi-party authorisation: a software interface that executes an update only after at least N out of M authorised people have approved it. We will describe this in a separate article.
How this builds on existing methods
TLS and code signing remain the foundation, and the project keeps asymmetric encryption for the device-to-cloud link. The new work addresses two gaps. First, asymmetric methods are exposed to future quantum attacks, which the project plan anticipates from around 2030 : a forthcoming article will cover our quantum-resistant authentication design. Second, the project targets devices that are offline when they are serviced, so a method that needs a live cloud connection will not always work for them.
What we will test
We start from three hypotheses:
- Offline verification: a device can verify a technician's or an update's authorisation locally, without a live connection to a cloud service.
- Existing hardware: the method can run on devices that use standard secure elements, without a hardware change.
- Field practicality: the added time per update and the effort to integrate the method into existing firmware stay within what a service organisation accepts.
The demonstrator will produce measurements for each hypothesis, and we will publish them.
Funding acknowledgement: Moore4Power is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe, call HORIZON-JU-CHIPS-2025-IA-two-stage of the Chips Joint Undertaking. Grant agreement ID: 101252572.
Disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author only. They do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission or of the other Moore4Power partners, and neither can be held responsible for them.