Demonstration of denial of charging attack on electric vehicle charging infrastructure and its consequences

Abstract

The recent upsurge in electric vehicle (EV) adoption has led to greener mobility but has also broadened the attack surface due to the increased interconnection between the entities like EV, EV charger, grid etc. We show in this paper that among these entities, the EV charger provides a possible attack surface through the available communication network. Adversaries at a minimum can disrupt the vehicular charging process known as denial of charging (DoC) attack. This attack is demonstrated on the real hardware setup of an EV charging, where we have considered the Bharat EV DC charging standard (BEVC-DC001) adopted by India which uses the controller area network (CAN) bus to communicate between EV charger and EV. The DoC attack can have significant consequences both on the electrical grid as well as individuals. The EV chargers (with connected EV) collectively serve as a large load demand, whose sudden inaccessibility would disrupt the supply–demand balance, triggering over frequency relays to either cause local or national blackout. Such a scenario is presented in this work on a microgrid (MG), in a real-time OPAL-RT environment. Not only can this attack lead to major transportation related problems but would also disrupt medical and emergency services.