Electric vehicle charging network security: A survey

With the rising number of electric vehicles, their charging network has expanded into a vast and intricate system involving multiple stakeholders and numerous charging service entities. It relies on various technologies, such as communication protocols, network connections, and data transmission, leading to the generation of substantial amounts of sensitive data. Ensuring its high security requires the implementation of a comprehensive array of security measures, including stringent identity authentication and access control techniques, cryptographic solutions to safeguard data, and diverse strategies for detecting and countering network attacks. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview of the mainstream architectures and communication protocols in electric vehicle charging networks. We also provide a brief introduction to other protocols used in charging networks and explore the charging infrastructure and its associated security requirements. We examine a charging network’s security challenges at its perception, network, and application layers, and summarize the important solutions proposed in recent literature. Additionally, we delve into privacy security and payment security in the charging business. We investigate the utilization of blockchain technology to safeguard charging networks. Finally, we highlight public safety issues of a charging network and suggest future research directions to steer further studies of charging network security.