Plug-in Electric Vehicle Fingerprinting: Authentication for Plug-in Electric Vehicles

Presented at ShmooCon XIII (2017), Jan. 14, 2017, 3 p.m. (60 minutes)

With increasing options for connectivity and reliance on drive-by-wire systems, automobiles have become targets for a variety of attacks. Researchers have exposed vulnerabilities in vehicle systems, garnering much attention and prompting government warnings. Hacking vehicles is a hot topic. However, there is one aspect of vehicle vulnerability that is underappreciated, mostly because it only applies to a minute percentage of the vehicles on the road today. Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) make up a tiny portion of the overall vehicle market, but they are becoming more common. PEV charging involves, authentication, payments, and, increasingly, communication for managing power flow to stabilize the electric power grid. In the design of many charging protocols, security is not always emphasized, or is only implemented in the cyber domain. As a cyber physical system, PEVs need authentication the cyber and the physical domain. In this talk we propose a means for charging stations to identify the type of PEV connected to charge without explicit communication of this information from the PEV. This approach is similar to that adopted in other fields to identify individual computers through a browser, or hardware. We report the results of initial testing, and outline future work.


Presenters:

  • Rebekah Houser
    Rebekah Houser is a first year graduate student pursuing a PhD in Computer and Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Computer Systems. She has a bachelor's of electrical engineering from the University of Delaware, which is also where she studies for her PhD. Rebekah works on two research projects. The first is the fingerprinting project for plug-in electric vehicles. The second project is an infrared scene projector, for which Rebekah works on the firmware team. A random fun fact about Rebekah: she started undergrad as an interior design major.

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