Blockchain architectures for enhancing EV infrastructure security: A unified framework for addressing sophisticated cyber-attacks

Over the last years the Electric Vehicles (EVs) are gradually adopted by users, as they have environmental, technological and financial benefits with respect to combustion engine vehicles. However, the abundance of connectivity interfaces constitutes them prone to cyber-attack scenarios targeting the entire infrastructure and especially the EVs, the EV Charging Stations as well as the Charging Station Management System that is used for their management, control and configuration. The cyber-attacks have increasing impact and risk as they may further propagate to the electrical grid, causing cascading effects as utility service disruptions or blackouts. The impact analysis though requires a threat taxonomy related to their Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) and an associated risk model, allowing to select the most prominent threats in the EV infrastructure. Additionally, such threats are currently detected and mitigated by anomaly detection systems also using Machine Learning systems, which nevertheless do not consider the distributed nature of EV infrastructures. The high level overarching objective of this article is three-fold: 1) to provide an initial security posture assessment of EV ecosystems as a reference point against which a detailed risk model is presented; 2) to identify the best practices and integration patterns in the adoption of blockchain technology to EV ecosystems for addressing EV-oriented attacks; and 3) to propose a blockchain-oriented architecture for the protection of the distributed EV ecosystems against cyber-attacks, which is also validated in a proof-of-concept infrastructure. The proposed approach presents a comprehensive Zero-Trust architecture for securing and unifying EV services across retail EV charging, energy trading, and energy management. The analysis illustrates data models, settlement and control flows, but also the security properties established, via a unified blockchain framework, assuming realistic adversarial capabilities.