Could Lithium Batteries Be Programmed to Explode?

DR R P

On September 17th last year, stunning news emerged from the Middle East: somehow, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah exploded right under their noses. I usually make it a personal policy to ignore the shenanigans that occur during eruptions of the otherwise eternally simmering conflict between Israel and its fanatical foes. The classical refrain of the exasperated teacher — “I don’t care who started it, it’s got to stop” — feels appropriate. But sounding as if it were something straight out of science fiction, this event is well worth considering on technical grounds. In particular, at the time the news was breaking, multiple theories were circulating about how the detonations had occurred. While we now know how it was done, the fact that such an audacious operation was ever contemplated sheds light on new tactics that could be used in conflicts far beyond the Middle East.

In the aftermath of what has been called a “broadcast bombing”, we learned that the explosions were the culmination of years of Israeli preparation. Israel had implanted small explosive charges in pagers under the brand name Gold Apollo, although Gold Apollo itself did not manufacture the pagers in question. Hezbollah purchased its pagers from a company called BAC Consulting in Budapest, and Israel had targeted its tampering so that only the pagers destined for Hezbollah were modified in this fashion. This is what is known as a supply chain attack: the sabotage of a product performed either during manufacture or by intercepting it during shipping, in order to place compromised equipment in an adversary’s hands. At the time, however, another possibility was under consideration — and I will freely admit it was the one I thought most likely when I first saw the reports. What if Israel had not needed to implant deliberately designed bombs in those pagers, and had instead made use of the inadvertently designed ‘bombs’ that were already there? Lithium-ion batteries.

I’ll come back to batteries shortly, but first a discussion of just how surprising the headlines were is in order. Science fiction authors have long predicted the future — sometimes with accuracy, or at least in a way that provides lessons for the future. While some of these lessons are presented in utopian visions, more militaristic writing can also serve as a valuable resource, particularly for spotting circumstances where innocent technologies can easily become weapons. Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I firmly recommend for its superb characterisation of Mike the supercomputer and its blueprint for a libertarian culture, imagines a grain shuttle system converted into interplanetary artillery bombardment. Larry Niven’s Known Space series features the Kzinti Lesson, in which an unarmed pacifist civilisation uses the exhaust plume of a relativistic starship to turn a last-ditch defence into a devastating victory.

We’ve all seen spectacles and horrors reported in war in the physical domain, both throughout history and in more contemporary events. In Ukraine, tiny drones now terrorise tanks. Large drones have even been used to rescue people from floods, so it is not inconceivable that something similar could one day be used to rescue hostages and political prisoners. Remember that tanks, as land ironclads, appeared in the sci-fi of H. G. Wells. Drones were written about by many authors well before the quadcopter was practical to produce, notably Iain M. Banks, who imagined fully sentient versions.

We also see spectacles and horrors within non-physical domains, such as the effects of cyberattacks — or even simply botched updates. But here was something that, at the time, appeared quite different. At a massive scale, it seemed — plausibly, until the full truth came out — that activity in a non-physical domain, the realm of software updates, might have been having decidedly physical effects in a paramilitary’s pockets.

Lithium-ion batteries are nowadays the go-to choice for rechargeable portable power sources, and the pagers in question used them. The other option for rechargeable batteries is nickel-metal hydride, which is effectively immune from catching fire but carries less energy per kilogram. One could not, for example, build something meant to drive quickly such as an electric car — let alone a drone meant to fly — using the lower energy density of nickel cells. An operating lithium-ion battery is a carefully choreographed electrochemical dance: the lithium ions that give this class of batteries their name are transferred from a cathode to a carbon anode during charging, then return the other way during discharge, creating a voltage potential that can power circuits. The materials suitable for use as electrolytes — through which the lithium ions must move — tend to be highly flammable organic solvents. The cell also depends on a separator layer that allows lithium ions to pass through it while blocking electrical conduction that would let the cell short out.

Accidents involving lithium-ion batteries can be caused by drawing too much current from them, charging them to too high a voltage per cell, allowing them to discharge to too low a voltage per cell, or through mechanical damage to their internal layers. These failure mechanisms allow heat and pressure to build up within the cells as the electrolyte chemicals break down, forming gases and generating further heat. Damage — even at microscopic scales — to the separator can allow internal short circuits to serve as another source of heating. These can become self-reinforcing processes, driving the battery into thermal runaway. Note particularly that lithium-ion batteries pose a different type of fire risk than fossil fuels. While batteries lack the energy density of liquid fuels, they can be sources of ignition; hydrocarbon fuels will only burn if something else ignites them.

In the heat of the moment, the idea that a software update could cause these to catch fire — particularly when the reporting was still confused enough not to distinguish between flames and explosions — was not implausible. E-cigarettes have been filmed going off in people’s pockets. When rumours came out from Lebanon, having first had to cross a language barrier, it wasn’t apparent whether they were implying those kinds of vaping-pipe deflagrations trapped in a tight casing, or a true detonation by actual explosives. Thinking more slowly, one then realises that fires started in that fashion would not all be simultaneous. The most likely failure modes involve pre-abused batteries combusting while recharging rather than when in use, and there would be variability between cells that would cause some to cook off later than others. A more thorough analysis then considers the protection features that lithium-ion batteries should be surrounded by to ensure this sort of thing cannot happen by accident. Consider it further, and you start to realise that while a software attack on totally normal pagers physically cannot cause that sort of destructive battery failure, if one posits pagers that had been sabotaged beforehand to remove those hardware protections, it becomes a possibility again. Then, with the full reporting of the supply-chain introduction of explosive charges, the headline became a little more mundane — but a shock-and-awe objective had definitely been achieved. And the more audacious method could still happen some day. Because this supply chain attack succeeded, it is conceivable that military strategists around the world will be more receptive to science-fictional-sounding proposals for future use. Though not as audacious as the Israeli-modified pagers, elements of the idea have already been copied by Ukraine against Russia.

It is surprising that nobody in Hezbollah thought to examine in detail the devices they were purchasing. Reports say that three to six grams — sources vary — of explosives were hidden inside the devices’ battery casings. Hiding them in this manner could have fooled a casual observer who merely opened the outer case, but if you’re a militia organisation about to buy these in bulk, you’d surely subject a few random samples to something more than a purely visual examination. One likely giveaway, if they had thought to check, would have been to measure the battery’s capacity. This would be roughly proportional, for a constant power draw, to the time between needing recharging. Depending on how the batteries within the pagers had been labelled — whether the label gave the true milliamp-hour capacity versus the expected capacity for a cell of that physical size — a careful examination would either find a cell rather larger than usual for its capacity, or find a cell that failed by a large margin to live up to the capacity written on its outer layer. In fact, it has been reported that some Hezbollah members even noted that the battery time — on the order of months for something that sips power as gently as those pagers did — was shorter than expected, but their leadership thought no more of it.

An attack performed using lithium-ion batteries themselves would not have been detectable by noticing inconsistent specifications. While any well-designed device containing a lithium-ion battery should have ‘defence in depth‘ using multiple independent systems to keep the battery well-behaved, a device that had been poorly manufactured — or deliberately maliciously manufactured — could be designed with these protections circumvented. No non-destructive test of the device would necessarily reveal the lack of these protections; you only know they are there when they stop the battery from catching fire. Without these systems in place, the non-combustion of the device is entirely at the mercy of the software running on it. If that small computer, typically a microcontroller of some form, executes the correct command, it could create a condition to draw an excessive current from the battery or allow the battery to be taken outside its safe per-cell voltage limits.

The scariest part is that the device could be supplied with software that behaves in a perfectly normal and safe fashion, only self-destructing when a remote over-the-air update is received that changes the firmware to make it become malicious. Windows 10’s GWX was regarded as terrible at the time. Google’s forcible installation of Covid tracing apps in the state of Massachusetts, and its new plans to interfere with people’s right to sideload applications on their own Android devices, are also widely criticised. But these all pale into insignificance when considering that in future we could face the possibility of remote updates to devices causing physical damage. “Own nothing and be happy,” they said, in regard to everything-as-a-service where the cloud can make remote changes to your property; here’s a hypothetical scenario where you’d own nothing because the cloud had set it all on fire.

For even a small device the size of a pager, the damage this could do is serious. One catching fire while unattended and near flammable materials could set a whole building ablaze. Lithium-ion battery fires are not easily extinguished. The general advice if you find one catching fire is to handle it with something non-combustible (tongs or a saucepan, for example) and throw it outside to let it burn itself out where it can’t set anything else ablaze. Also, avoid the smoke it produces — this can contain hydrofluoric acid. I, for one, am quite perplexed when officials appearing in the media alongside reports of lithium-ion incidents have advised people to evacuate their homes because of lithium-ion device fires, rather than — if they spot the combusting device early enough to move it without endangering themselves too much more — evacuating the burning item swiftly from the nearest window instead. Such an attitude carries a smell, albeit perhaps not quite so acrid as that of a burning battery, of excessive safetyism, totally forgetting that while evacuating the person might save a few lives, evacuating the burning battery saves both lives and the property of the person and their neighbours too. Science fiction provides a lesson here as well; all the best authors knew that if an atomic spaceship developed trouble, you’d be better off ejecting the reactor, not the crew.

For a device the size of a pager, there would have to be some relatively unusual circuitry included for it to be able to draw such a high current as would be necessary to cause battery ignition at any time other than during charging. Had they not used actual explosives, and had they tried to set off the batteries instead, the Israelis probably wouldn’t have been able to do much with an entirely unmodified pager. PCB traces inside something like this are often thin enough that, at least for the high-current failure mode, they might burn themselves out — becoming insulating open circuits — before they could cause the battery to ignite.

But battery packs of the size found in e-scooters, e-bikes, and electric cars have to supply high currents by the very nature of the devices they power. Electric motors produce torque in proportion to the current flowing through them, so for substantial torques you’re usually looking at tens (cordless power tools) to hundreds (electric cars) of amps. If someone were to design such a system without a fuse, then lock the rotor to stop any back-EMF from opposing the battery’s voltage, they would discover the hard way that any big motor can become the short circuit necessary to make a lithium-ion battery go up in flames.

I stress that with proper protection circuitry physically built in and separated from the higher-level software, no amount of software malice can cause these kinds of flaming failures. A lithium-ion battery is genuinely quite a scary thing, and some are built to poor standards which mean that under very bad luck some may spontaneously catch fire — usually during charging cycles. But it is usually impossible for one to catch fire on command simply due to software. Even though, with an abundance of caution, I’ve eschewed lithium-ion in favour of the effectively-never-flammable nickel – metal hydride cell chemistry in the electromechanical systems I have worked on, I’m familiar with the principle of ensuring your device isn’t going to destroy itself simply because of a software fault. A motor drive circuit I developed uses a set of 74-series logic gates to ensure that no amount of software hanging would let a pulse long enough to damage the motor via an over-current condition — since the motor, being an inductive load, experiences a current which rises with time — ever reach the motor-controlling MOSFETs (specialised transistors optimised for switching large currents). The very MOSFETs it uses have an inbuilt over-current cut-off, and this is backed up with a surface-mounted resettable Polymeric Positive Temperature Coefficient (PPTC) fuse. Making things that won’t fail — or at least won’t fail too terribly — isn’t too hard for anyone with a good mind for engineering and for logically thinking through chains of consequences. But this assumes that the person designing the device is trying to avoid harmful consequences. Do we really think the Chinese Communist Party, which has members embedded in every large company headquartered in that oppressive nation, considers the possible explosions of electric cars across the West to be a consequence they would seek to avoid? In the light of the Hezbollah pagers incident, it is plausible that the communists are drooling at the thought of causing explosions in electric cars in the independent and democratic nation of Taiwan as a last-minute prelude to an invasion.

The answer here is, of course, not bans on batteries. While I would be happy to see lithium-ion used in far fewer places, it isn’t legitimately within the purview of the state to mandate which technologies people should find the most appropriate to solve their problems. The answer is also not governmental attacks on free trade by trying to block or excessively tax goods at borders. If we want to break our addiction to Chinese mass production, we need to tear up red tape at home to provide for our needs and wants; companies may find they need to do this unilaterally in open opposition to governmental busybodies. Commentator Bernie Spofforth has argued that trying to bring back all manufacturing to the West would lead to ruinous increases in the price of consumer goods, but that does not have to be the case if we in the West use automation in the places where China uses cheap labour. In fact, even China is starting that shift from labourers paid very little to fully automated production lines paid nothing at all. A long-term ideal to strive for would be independence from Chinese manufacturing — not at the cost of higher prices for goods, but instead by having fully automated versatile micro-factories of some kind in every town, perhaps even locally owned ones in every village, able to pump out goods on request with no need for human attention during day-to-day operation. Such small-scale production could never be as efficient as specialised factories churning out one kind of item, but so long as raw materials are cheap — as they long have been compared to the prices of manufactured goods — and energy is cheap, which it could be with the cancellation of Net Zero, this difference isn’t likely to matter much. Alas, governments of the West nowadays act as if they believe China’s economic advances are due not to its efforts in building up manufacturing capacity but instead to China’s lack of freedom. Sir Humphrey and his Deep State chums seem to believe that by copying China’s surveillance architecture we would somehow magically replicate its economic gains.

The answer then, being neither bans nor more red tape, is a better understanding of technology and a better public familiarity with maintaining and modifying their own devices. That way people would know how to spot something suspicious where an innocuous component should be, and they would know not to trust SMART devices that can be updated remotely to serve not as your butler but your jailer. Right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann has observed that in recent times freedom has been going down as technology goes up. This is in contrast to the trend over previous decades and indeed centuries, where technological progress consistently opened up new freedoms. The difference may be that technologies are now ever more focused on being something people are expected to use without questioning at all, let alone developing a more complete understanding of.

Plenty of Hezbollah militants with missing eyes or digits will be ruing the day they ever let an ‘expert‘ talk them into trusting that pager system. Going back to science fiction momentarily, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series sees the recently established First Foundation on its planet of Terminus market its scientific expertise to superstitious neighbours in the guise of a religion, then revoke its neighbours’ right to practise this ‘religion’ when it threatens to invade Terminus. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It would appear that those who do not learn to understand technology are doomed to kneeling at the feet of those who declare themselves to be a technological priesthood, doing things mere mortals cannot comprehend. The lesson for the rest of the world is that we must learn to recognise these new tactics of warfare. What starts as a tactic amid Middle Eastern chaos could all too easily be deployed to much more destructive ends by Xi Jinping’s regime, or even by Western governments desperate to suppress dissent against technocratic rule.

• Buying a car: Readers of the Daily Sceptic are already well aware of the practical limitations of electric vehicles, but the lesson of the pagers incident provides another good reason to avoid them. This applies in particular to those manufactured in China, where the Communist Party has every motive to insist on weakening hardware protections, which could therefore make software-update-initiated mass combustion a physical possibility, even if an outlandish one.

• Getting into Meshtastic: Do check carefully over any batteries that come free along with the circuit board you buy, in case some government has invaded the supply chain and decided anyone with encrypted, uncensorable radio communications is automatically a ‘Right-wing extremist‘ liable to commit assault-with-a-deadly-adjective at any moment. Yes, the risk in this scenario seems hard to believe, but after what we’ve seen, we now know it is not completely impossible.

A vital part of our immunisation against technocracy must be to understand, to the best of our individual abilities, technology.

Dr R P completed a robotics PhD during the global overreaction to Covid. He spends his time with one eye on an oscilloscope, one hand on a soldering iron and one ear waiting for the latest bad news. He has been trying to avoid lithium-ion batteries for many years.

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This article (Could Lithium Batteries Be Programmed to Explode?) was created and published by The Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Dr. R P

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