Beyond the Cyber Resilience Act: Building Cyber Resilience for the EV Charging Ecosystem

Combining Cyber Threat Intelligence, Real-Time Detection, and Expert Response for Unified Compliance with CRA

The European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), adopted in October 2024, is a landmark regulation aimed at elevating cybersecurity standards across all products with digital components, including the connected hardware and software systems that power EV charging infrastructure.

The CRA places broad obligations on manufacturers, including those who design, develop, or brand charge points, backend systems, and embedded communication software used throughout the EV charging ecosystem. These obligations span the entire product lifecycle, from secure design and development to vulnerability management and incident reporting.

Understanding the CRA: Scope, Requirements, and Timelines for EV Charging Stakeholders

Covering the full product lifecycle, from design to maintenance and decommissioning, the CRA requires manufacturers and service providers to ensure built-in security, report incidents, and maintain ongoing risk mitigation strategies. This is especially critical for EV charging equipment and infrastructure, which is increasingly targeted by threat actors due to its role at the intersection of transportation and energy.

While CRA enforcement will begin in October 2027, several requirements, such as reporting exploited vulnerabilities within 24 hours, may come into force earlier. Compliance is mandatory for all digital products not explicitly regulated under vertical legislation, and EV charging solutions fall squarely within this scope.

Key CRA requirements relevant to EV Charging stakeholders:

• Vulnerability Management Process: Providers must continuously monitor, assess, and mitigate vulnerabilities in both charge points and backend systems.
• Timely Security Updates: Software and firmware updates must be securely delivered, signed, and protected from rollback or tampering.
• Unauthorized Access Prevention: Robust access control for APIs, mobile apps, remote interfaces, and device-level access is mandatory.
• Data Confidentiality and Integrity: Sensitive user data, charging session records, and grid interaction data must be encrypted and protected.
• Secure Communication: OCPP and other protocol traffic must be safeguarded from spoofing, interception, or replay attacks using TLS or equivalent methods.
• Event Logging and Monitoring: Logs must be generated and retained for all security-relevant events, enabling forensic investigations and compliance reporting.

These requirements intersect with other regulations impacting the sector, including the EU NIS2 Directive, which expands cybersecurity requirements for operators of essential and important entities, explicitly naming the energy and transport sectors, including EV charging networks.

Supporting CRA Compliance with Upstream’s Cybersecurity Solutions

Upstream provides a unified platform tailored to the EV charging and smart mobility ecosystem, equipping EV charging providers with the tools to meet CRA, as well as other regulations such as NIS2, requirements with confidence.

AutoThreat® Intelligence: Continuous Threat Awareness & Vulnerability Management

Upstream’s AutoThreat® PRO solution aggregates intelligence from deep and dark web sources, CVE databases, and attacker forums to support:

• Real-time identification of vulnerabilities targeting charge point firmware, OCPP protocols, backend interfaces, and mobile apps.
• Incident mapping to industry-specific threat campaigns (e.g., charger hijacking, API exploitation).
• Enhanced response preparedness through context-rich alerts and threat actor profiling.

Upstream’s XDR Platform: Real-Time Monitoring and Detection

Upstream’s XDR platform is purpose-built to deliver cybersecurity visibility, automation, and resilience across complex EV charging environments, including charge points, backend systems, APIs, and communication networks. It aligns directly with multiple CRA requirements, supporting a secure-by-design approach across the entire lifecycle of EV charging infrastructure.

Access Control Enforcement

EV charging systems must be protected from unauthorized access, whether through physical interfaces, remote management platforms, or exposed APIs.
Upstream’s platform continuously monitors for:

• Unexpected or suspicious API transactions, including privilege escalation attempts, brute force login patterns, or lateral movement across services
• Device-level access anomalies, such as unusual firmware commands or local port interactions that may indicate tampering
• Authentication failures and misconfigurations, ensuring no default or hardcoded credentials exist and that role-based access controls are enforced. This supports compliance with CRA’s requirement to prevent unauthorized manipulation or data theft via strict identity, session, and interface controls

Update Process Validation

Secure and timely updates are central to the CRA’s expectations. Manufacturers and service providers must ensure that all software and firmware updates are delivered through secure, encrypted channels, are digitally signed and validated, and are resilient against rollback or spoofing.

Upstream continuously monitors the entire update lifecycle to ensure process integrity. This includes detecting incomplete or failed deployments, identifying version mismatches that may signal outdated or unauthorized builds, and verifying compatibility between the update package and the target charger or backend system. The platform also performs post-update behavioral checks to uncover unexpected side effects or performance degradation following deployment.

These capabilities not only support CRA compliance but also mirror requirements found in R156-style Software Update Management Systems (SUMS), ensuring charging infrastructure stakeholders maintain secure, traceable, and auditable update workflows.

Communication Security

All communications across the EV charging infrastructure, including those between vehicles, charge points, backend servers, and mobile applications, must be protected from eavesdropping, spoofing, tampering, and replay attacks. These protections are explicitly required under the CRA to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data in transit.

Upstream continuously monitors the security of these communication flows through a combination of protocol and behavioral analysis. This includes:

• Protocol-level traffic inspection, such as for OCPP, to detect malformed payloads, tampering attempts, or unauthorized command injections.
• TLS encryption enforcement, ensuring that all data exchanges follow secure transport protocols and flagging handshake anomalies or downgrade attempts.
• Replay attack detection, using sequence validation to identify repeated or delayed message attempts that could be used to manipulate charging sessions or impersonate legitimate devices.
• Untrusted connection identification, detecting rogue server interactions, spoofed endpoints, or unexpected peer devices that may signal a compromise or man-in-the-middle attempt.

Together, these capabilities fulfill critical CRA requirements for secure communication channels and play a vital role in enabling safe, remote control and management of EV charging systems, especially as infrastructure becomes increasingly distributed and software-defined.

Data Integrity Checks

The CRA places strong emphasis on safeguarding both personal and operational data. For EV charging infrastructure stakeholders, this includes protecting sensitive customer information, charging session metadata, and backend operational records from tampering, leakage, or misuse.

Upstream supports these requirements through a comprehensive approach to data integrity and confidentiality. Key capabilities include:

• Real-time monitoring of critical session data, such as user identities, geolocation, timestamps, energy consumption, and billing activity, ensuring all transactions are accurately recorded and traceable.
• Hashing and validation mechanisms to detect unauthorized changes in stored or transmitted data, supporting early detection of manipulation attempts or system compromise.
• Behavioral anomaly detection to flag irregular patterns, such as abnormal energy use, duplicate sessions, or geographic inconsistencies, that may indicate fraud, spoofing, or misconfigured equipment.

These protections help ensure compliance with CRA requirements related to data confidentiality, accuracy, and integrity, while also strengthening trust and transparency across the EV charging ecosystem.

Log Management, Event Monitoring & Detection

Effective logging and monitoring are essential for both real-time threat detection and post-incident forensic investigations. Under the CRA, manufacturers and infrastructure providers are required to generate, secure, and maintain access to logs capturing all security-relevant events, including authentication failures, configuration changes, software updates, and network anomalies.

Upstream’s platform delivers end-to-end event monitoring and log management tailored to the EV charging ecosystem. Core capabilities include:

• Automated log ingestion from a wide range of sources, including charge points, backend cloud services, mobile interfaces, and update mechanisms, ensuring unified visibility across the entire infrastructure.
• Built-in behavioral detectors that identify abnormal sequences of events, unauthorized configuration changes, or patterns indicative of distributed or coordinated attacks.
• Immutable storage with tamper-evident design, preserving forensic integrity and supporting defensible audit trails during investigations or regulatory reviews.
• SIEM-ready integrations, allowing seamless delivery of structured log data to existing enterprise security systems for alert correlation, visualization, and compliance reporting.

These capabilities enable EV charging providers to maintain a proactive cybersecurity posture and demonstrate operational transparency, while fulfilling CRA requirements, including the ability to support continuous vulnerability and incident reporting.

Upstream SOC: Expert Monitoring and Mitigation for EV Charging Resilience

As cyber threats increasingly target the critical infrastructure supporting EV charging networks, real-time monitoring and rapid response are essential to ensuring resilience, compliance, and operational continuity.

By centralizing visibility, accelerating time-to-detection, and supporting audit-ready response protocols, Upstream’s SOC delivers 24/7 monitoring, triage, and expert-led investigation services tailored to the mobility and EV ecosystem. Built to address the specific threats facing connected infrastructure, the SOC enables EV charging stakeholders to detect, contextualize, and mitigate attacks before they escalate into outages or regulatory violations. Key capabilities include:

• Domain-specific detection and triage, combining deep mobility expertise with AI-driven alert enrichment to minimize false positives and prioritize high-risk events, such as suspicious API activity, charger tampering, or communication protocol abuse.
• Proactive incident handling, aligned with CRA mandates for 24-hour reporting of exploited vulnerabilities and security incidents.
• Continuous threat monitoring across distributed assets, including charge points, cloud platforms, APIs and mobile applications, and third-party integrations, supporting full-stack observability and root-cause analysis.
• Regulatory-grade incident reporting, providing structured forensic summaries, timeline reconstruction, and recommended mitigation steps to support both internal response teams and external compliance obligations.
• Operational integration with Upstream’s XDR and AutoThreat® PRO solutions, enabling a seamless workflow from detection to threat intelligence correlation, response orchestration, and long-term risk reduction.

One Platform, Multiple Regulatory Frameworks

Beyond CRA, Upstream’s solutions are built to support an expanding landscape of EV charging-related cyber regulations. This includes alignment with:

• NIS2 Directive: Covering essential service providers in energy and transport.
• EU RED Delegated Act on Internet-Connected Devices: Applying to smart hardware such as charge points.
• National cyber mandates across EU member states focusing on grid-connected infrastructure and digital services.

By consolidating threat detection, intelligence, monitoring, and incident response into a unified platform, Upstream helps EV charging stakeholders break down silos and build a resilient cybersecurity posture. This integrated approach streamlines compliance while strengthening protection against fast-evolving threats across the entire charging ecosystem.

The CRA, NIS2, and other emerging regulations are reshaping the cybersecurity landscape for EV infrastructure stakeholders. With increasingly sophisticated attacks targeting charging systems and their digital interfaces, relying on fragmented or generic security tools is no longer sufficient.

Upstream delivers a purpose-built platform combining deep domain expertise, real-time detection, threat intelligence, and operational support, empowering EV charging suppliers, operators, and providers to stay ahead of cyber risks while meeting the demands of modern regulation with confidence and clarity.