PREVENT: A Mechanism for Preventing Message Tampering Attacks in Electric Vehicle Networks
Electric Vehicle (EV) adoption has been increasing in recent years due to multiple factors. Though EVs offer many advantages, the cyber security of EV networks is often overlooked. When individuals charge their EVs at charging stations, the communication between the EV and the other components of the charging system is through the Internet. It is crucial to understand the potential attacks that an attacker could launch and propose solutions to prevent such attacks to safeguard the EV networks. In this paper, we address message tampering attacks on EV networks and propose a mechanism to prevent them. Existing solutions for message tampering are not suitable for EV networks due to the high computation cost and latency requirements. In the proposed solution, EVs generate authentication parameters based on the charging requests they transmit. The authentication parameters are delivered to a central server together with the charging requests. This enables the server to verify the integrity of the received charging requests. Since the proposed mechanism does not include computationally expensive operations, it does not add significant cost. We present a formal security proof to show that the proposed mechanism provides protection from message tampering attacks and achieves several security properties in the EV charging framework. A performance analysis is also presented to show the computation cost of the proposed mechanism.