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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot more information on this stuff in the Chinese and Vietnamese part of the internet, the part that Apple's lawyers can't easily reach (nor Google and most other mainstream search engines these days, for better or worse.) Repair/thirdparty accessory industries are also increasingly keeping what they've RE'd to themselves because they know they're fighting a war against Apple with what they've found, and no one is going to dare pop the golden goose.

If the references to authentication and certificates weren't enough, there is definitely some DRM crypto going on in there. Yet the Chinese were able to clone the 1-wire authentication chip within a week or so of the official products' release.

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> There's a lot more information on this stuff in the Chinese and Vietnamese part of the internet, the part that Apple's lawyers can't easily reach

Where? Will you post some links?

As far as I know often it’s just a late night run of exactly the same factory that makes the legitimate products.

No, they actually cloned the authentication chip using an 8051:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/oshw/oshw-apple-lightning-conn...

It's likely they reverse-engineered and managed to extract a key from a real one.

This makes me hopeful that VIN spoofing on Tesla superchargers with a cloned adapter will work at some point for other vehicles. If a proprietary cable auth chip can get reversed that hard - why not an "open spec" ev charging protocol/cable/adapter?

> This makes me hopeful that VIN spoofing on Tesla superchargers with a cloned adapter will work at some point for other vehicles.

Some jurisdictions take stealing energy as a crime. Germany, for example, has up to five years of prison on the books [1].

Kids, don't mess around with energy if you don't exactly know what the f..k you are doing and know the legal and technical risks involved.

[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__248c.html

1. That's not really a deterrent to the hacker mindset, necessarily.

2. The idea is you'd be tricking the supercharger into letting you pay for it, not necessarily stealing it.

That law doesn't seem to apply.

I think the point was that stealing energy is likely to be seen as a crime in general, not that this specific law applies to this specific hypothetical.

In general stealing anything is frowned upon and is at best a temporary imbalance in technical ability to steal versus economic incentives to stop theft.

Someone using a VIN spoofer to free-ride or enjoy lower rates on Tesla's supercharger with their own vehicle is definitely acting unauthorized.

Besides, courts have ruled that even charging a phone at your workplace without authorization fulfilled the criteria, the case was only thrown out later on because firing someone over stealing 1.6 cents worth of electricity after 19 years of employment is ridiculous [1].

[1] https://www.rodorf.de/03_stgb/bt_14_248c.htm

Yes, but unauthorized is not what the law says. The law is about using a wrong conductor to steal energy. Not the case when the charging hardware is not modified.

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