Background
The increased adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), driven by environmental priorities and supportive government policies, has boosted the global demand for a reliable, robust, and widespread network of EV charging stations, making them a critical part of modern infrastructure.
However, EV Charging networks face significant cybersecurity risks and exposures. Issues include unprotected internet connectivity, insufficient authentication and encryption, absence of network segmentation, and lack of suitable cyber monitoring and visibility tools.
SaiFlow and Palo Alto Networks partnered together to help Charge Point Operators protect their distributed energy resources (DER) and EV charging networks with a complete end-to-end cybersecurity solution suite.
Integration Details
Palo Alto Networks’ Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) and Panorama platform integrated with SaiFlow’s Energy Cybersecurity platform deliver a leading EV charging and Distributed Energy Resources (DER) cybersecurity solution.
With this integration, SaiFlow’s SaaS platform discovers and collects a full inventory of all energy devices in the network such as EV chargers, smart meters, energy storage solutions, and network components. Then, SaiFlow’s platform assesses the risk and vulnerabilities associated with the discovered devices and automatically generates tailored zero-trust firewall rules for Palo Alto Networks’ NGFW, setting the needed network segmentation and control to protect DER and EV Charging networks.
SaiFlow’s platform monitors the OCPP channels, and on-site network, and correlates the communication, and energy telemetry to detect deviations, anomalies, and suspicious activities across the EV Charging network. Detecting anomalies and suspicious activities triggers contextualized alerts and creates NGFW rules to automatically quarantine the affected assets, providing a comprehensive cybersecurity solution for EV Charging and distributed energy networks.
PANW and SaiFlow’s joint solution provides complete visibility and dynamic protection for EV charging sites and DER networks
Dynamic network protection with full visibility
SaiFlow’s platform provides continuous monitoring and discovery of all energy assets within the EV charging infrastructure. The platform automatically generates tailored, recommended firewall rules, which are seamlessly integrated into Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW).
The rules are based on SaiFlow’s deep know-how in EV charging and distributed energy networks, incorporating dedicated hardening policies for known and essential services, individual asset requirements, and authorized connections to SaaS and management platforms.
The NGFW rules and asset list are dynamically updated to accommodate new installations of EV chargers, energy assets, and EV charging sites.
Detection of fraud, energy theft, and energy-related attacks
Combined with the Palo Alto Networks’ Next-Generation Firewall and the Panorama platform, SaiFlow pulls all network logs and blocked sessions in real-time, and correlates the site’s communication with the EV chargers and DER energy telemetry patterns.
SaiFlow’s platform alerts in real-time on anomalies in the energy telemetry stream, suspicious charging and driver’s activities, and unrecognized outbound or inbound traffic. All logs, alerts, and mitigation playbooks are visible on SaiFlow’s platform to investigate any cyber incidents further. Moreover, all alerts and data points could tie into other Palo Alto Networks products such as the Cortex XSOAR platform to provide even more granularity of enforcement control of their environment.
To learn more, download the integration solution brief here