The increasing adoption of electric vehicles is creating a growing demand for charging infrastructure, driving a transformation in the access and use of energy through the controlled deployment of fast, efficient, and secure charging stations.
Specifically, in response to potential cyber threats, researchers from the NICS group of the University of Malaga have devised an innovative solution designed to combat these increasingly frequent cyber-attacks in electric vehicle charging stations. It has been published in the scientific journal International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection.

“These stations integrate a large number of components, both physical and digital, whose complexity not only creates new security vulnerabilities, but also significantly expands the attack surface,” says Cristina Alcaraz, Professor at the UMA School of Computer Engineering, one of the authors of this work, who also points out that potential threats include fraud or theft of energy by end users, as well as attacks against the operational capacity of the power grid itself.

Intelligent agents for real-time monitoring
The proposal developed by the UMA is based on the deployment of a set of software agents embedded in the charging stations capable of monitoring, supervising and analyzing in real time the status of charging stations from different functional perspectives, controlled by a centralized system. Overall, the solution is based on a distributed intelligence system supported by AI techniques, consensus mechanisms for continuous and collaborative diagnosis and the use of blockchain technology to ensure the traceability, integrity and trustworthy associated with the diagnostic process.

“Each agent evaluates the status of chargers, communications and connected devices in order to detect anomalies, operational faults or potential safety incidents. In addition, these agents, which are connected to a central monitoring system, compares the information they obtained locally with that from nearby stations, providing a more complete, accurate and contextualized shared overview of the situation,” explains Dr. Alcaraz.
Higher accuracy
The UMA engineer clarifies that, unlike traditional approaches, which generally focus only on isolated monitoring of events, this system based on situational awareness detects with higher accuracy which areas, devices or components are affected, also providing contextual information on where, how, when and why such anomalies occur, which would lead to more efficient, and rapid responses.

In short, this system provides a new way to guarantee the protection of electric vehicle charging infrastructures, in which collaboration between intelligent agents and the use of disruptive technologies contribute to increasing the resilience and safety of future electric mobility networks.

The paper ‘Situational awareness for trustworthy charging scenarios’ is part of the II Smart-Campus Own Plan of the UMA and is aligned with the European DUCA project with regard to the deployment of blockchain technology applied to energy environments. Professor of Telematic Engineering Javier López and researcher Alberto García are also authors of this study.