Abstract

For a genuinely connected smart world, the overlapping of the Internet of Things (IoT) services from different sectors becomes inevitable. One of the rather interesting collaborations is that between Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and Smart Grids. Particularly, a perfect manifestation of such integration of services is the rise of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and their charging infrastructure. Although the full integration of ITS and smart grid services would alleviate the development of self-driving intelligent vehicles, there are major challenges that are yet to be resolved, one of crucial importance is their security. To contextualize such security issues, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the status-quo of EVs and charging ecosystem. In that regard, we survey the entities, protocols, deployment types and major manufacturers of Electric Vehicles Charging Stations (EVCS) and identify the key weaknesses causing security issues. Moreover, we propose a novel attack that exploit the vulnerabilities in the EVCS to create a botnet of them, tamper their schedules and cause frequency disturbances to the power grid. In order to mitigate such an attack, we explore the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain individually and collaborate in both securing the EV charging ecosystem and efficiently manage the energy trading among EVs, EVCS and power grid. Consequently, we expand on the collaboration of AI and Blockchain and propose an anomaly detection engine to detect the proposed attack demonstrating is effectiveness in flagging anomalous charging behavior. Finally, we re-envision the EV charging ecosystem by integrating both AI and Blockchain to secure both public and private EVCS from the proposed attack.