Cybersecurity of Onboard Charging Systems for Electric Vehicles – Review, Challenges and Countermeasures

In this paper, the impacts of various data integrity attacks on the power electronic hardware present in an EV charger are comprehensively analyzed in order to provide necessary recommendations to defend against cyberattacks on electric vehicles and their onboard charging (OBC) systems. The adverse scenarios arising due to cyberattacks are carefully reviewed in this study, which includes (a) interfering with the main charger controller (FPGA) logic and its data, (b) establishing fake communication between the charging controller and other electronic control units (ECUs) connected over same controller area network (CAN) bus, and (c) interfering with the battery management system functionalities. A 6.6kW interleaved totem-pole PFC front-end followed by a high frequency DC-DC converter is used as our OBC representative system in this analysis. Possibilities and ways of potential cyberattacks on this model are investigated in detail. Effort is made towards providing software as well as hardware design-level protection mechanisms to mitigate the malicious effects of such cyberattacks on the OBC hardware. This system is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink to verify the fault occurrences under various data integrity attacks as well as to validate the effectiveness of our proposed countermeasure approaches. Quantitative analyses of the obtained results clearly demonstrate that if adequate precautionary measures are properly taken while designing the charging architecture (e.g., implementing intelligence to the main controller), any electrical hazard or deterioration of health of the components can be avoided to the maximum extent under the circumstances of a malicious cyberattack.