AT&T SOLAR POWERED CHARGING STATIONS THROUGHOUT NYC, BUT NO SECURITY ADDED TO PROTECT YOUR INFO

AT&T PUBLIC CHARGING STATIONS

Public charging stations have become increasingly popular in airports and shipping malls, despite the risks, but these indoor machines are usually owned and operated by a third party of some kind. AT&T is now sponsoring a series of solar-powered smartphone charging stations in NYC with absolutely no plans to try and secure or protect potential users.
Street Charge is a collaborative effort between Goal Zero and AT&T to put solar-powered charging stations in outdoor areas throughout New York City. Starting at Fort Green Park and eventually moving on to Coney Island, Riverside Park, Central Park, and several other prominent locations, these charging stations will exist as a small silver pillar with cables for your smartphone. You can stand there and continue to use the phone while it charges, or you can set it on one of the three panels on either side of the platform and let it charge up while you enjoy the venue.

The charging stations support six devices at a time, with both micro USB and Apple’s Lightning adapter. The Street Charge units are modular, and can be outfitted with lighting, WiFi, and space for advertising, or other signage depending on the environment.


This sounds great in concept, but there’s more than a couple of reasons why a standalone charging station that isn’t actively monitored could be a disaster. Setting aside the high theft rate for smartphones in NYC — such that the NYPD has a special department just for tracking them down — there are issues with the charging stations. Lightning adapters can be modified to jailbreak an iPhone and steal all of the information on the device in under a minute, and all it would take is for someone with malicious intent to have access to the charging station long enough to hide the hardware somewhere on/in the station.

Android users are vulnerable as well, with a similar exploit found with micro USB cables. In fact just about every smartphone is vulnerable to this kind of attack, and once these Street Charge stations are set up there’s no way to monitor them all day every day to make sure no one tampers with them.

Unfortunately, there’s just no good way to have public charging stations and be able to guarantee that they are safe. This is one of the big arguments in support of inductive charging and the Qi standard. These kinds of vulnerabilities aren’t possible with that technology, and if deployed correctly you can just have a table next to a park bench or a specific zone on a coffee table where you can get some power.

Using a physical cable that you don’t own, where you can’t see what the other end is connected to, is just a bad idea. With AT&T’s name plastered on these stations, there’s a pretty clear place to point a finger should the worst happen.