Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure - Security Considerations and Approaches (2012)

Rechargeable electric vehicles are receiving increasing attention from different stakeholders: from customers as gas prices are constantly rising, from car manufacturers to address customer, market, and environmental demands, and also from electric energy utilities for integrating them into smart electric grids. While in the first step, the emphasis is placed on electric vehicles as energy consumers, using their battery for storing energy and feeding it back to the energy network will be the consequent next step. Batteries of electric vehicles will realize a distributed energy electric storage for stabilizing the electric power grid. Thus the electric vehicle will participate as a mobile energy node within the smart grid having two types of interfaces, one for electricity and one for data communication for charging and feedback control, information exchange, and for billing. Since IT security in the smart grid is already considered as a major point to be addressed, the enhancement of the smart grid with electric mobility has to address IT security as well. This article describes example interactions of electric vehicles with the charging infrastructure and it shows which security requirements have to be fulfilled in important use cases. Moreover, security considerations of current standardization activities ISO/IEC and SAE are described. combined service stations, e.g., for parking lots, or common home power plugs in residential areas. Closely linked with the pure flow of energy is the management and control of the energy demand for charging electric vehicles. It allows matching the energy demand with the energy available within the energy grid. A defined part of the vehicle battery's capacity can also be used as energy storage to stabilize the energy grid when needed by feeding back energy from the vehicle to the electrical grid. Besides the control of energy flow there may be a second communication channel for the billing for consumed or provided energy. The charging infrastructure as a part of the critical infrastructure Smart Grid requires integrated protection against unintentional and intentional attacks. Safety and IT security measures, which are already being part of the Smart Grid core (e.g., defined as standard or realized in proprietary deployments), need to be enhanced to cover also the Smart Grid access infrastructure. This Smart Grid access infrastructure is provided for electric vehicles through the charging infrastructure. While current deployments do not feature an information exchange between the electric vehicle and the charging infrastructure beside a minimum local control of the charging process through pilot signals, upcoming standards and proposed scenarios provide feature rich communication options. The Smart Grid communication and control network of an energy utility is increasingly opened to various nodes not being under control of any energy network operator and thereby exposed to attacks. Highly dependable management and operations of the information infrastructure are prerequisites for a highly reliable energy network as the power system increasingly relies on the availability of the information infrastructure. Therefore, the information infrastructure must be operated according to the same level of reliability as required for the stability of the power system infrastructure to prevent any type of outage. Especially consumers and utility companies can both benefit from managing this intelligently, and standards anticipating the new environment are emerging from many directions. The immediately apparent security needs target the prevention of financial fraud and ensure the reliable operation of the power grid. Both are complex objectives. But surely all of the security ramifications of the charging infrastructure have not been discovered yet. Especially the interaction between new market participants and value added services is currently under investigation. In any case, ensuring privacy, safety, and assuring that the