A Privacy-Preserving Method with Flexible Charging Schedules for Electric Vehicles in the Smart Grid

The Smart Grid (SG) is an emerging modernized electrical power system with advanced monitoring and control mechanism, and improved faulttolerance. The SG converges traditional power grid with a bidirectional communication and information system into the same infrastructure. Electric Vehicles (EVs), with their energy storage capacity and bidirectional communication capability, are envisioned to be an essential component of the SG. EVs can play the role of distributed energy resources by storing energy in off-peak hours and providing energy to the grid during peak hours or system contingencies. The energy stored by an EV is equivalent to the average energy drawn by multiple residential houses. As a result, simultaneous charging by a large number of EVs can create sudden energy imbalance in the grid. The mismatch between the energy generation and demand can create cascading faults resulting in load shedding. To prevent such situation, EVs are required to pre-schedule charging events at a Charging Station (CS). To efficiently manage a scheduled event, an EV is required to transmit information such as a valid ID, state-of-charge, distance from a CS, location, speed, etc. However, the data transmitted by an EV can be used to reveal information such as the movement of the vehicle, visits to a hospital, time to arrive at office, etc. The transmitted information can be used to create profiles of the owners of the EVs, breaching their location privacy. In the existing literature, it is recommended to use pseudonyms for different transactions by an EV to achieve location privacy. The majority of the works in the literature are based on anonymous authentication mechanism, where missing a charging event by an EV is considered as malicious and the corresponding EV is penalized (e.g., blacklisted). However, missing a charging event may happen due to many valid reasons and flexibility of scheduling can encourage consumer participation. On the other hand, missing charging events results in monetary loss to the CSs. In this thesis, an authentication method is developed to provide anonymity to EVs. The proposed method also addresses the cost-effectiveness of flexibility in charging events for the EVs and the CSs. A network setup that sub-divides a regional area into smaller zones to achieve better privacy, is proposed. A MATLAB simulation is designed to demonstrate the Degree of Anonymity (DoA) achieved in different stages of the proposed method and the optimal number of missed charging events. Additionally, a method to determine sub-division of zones from the simulation results, is studied

Secure and privacy-aware proxy mobile IPv6 protocol for vehicle-to-grid networks

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks have emerged as a new communication paradigm between Electric Vehicles (EVs) and the Smart Grid (SG). In order to ensure seamless communications between mobile EVs and the electric vehicle supply equipment, the support of ubiquitous and transparent mobile IP communications is essential in V2G networks. However, enabling mobile IP communications raises real concerns about the possibility of tracking the locations of connected EVs through their mobile IP addresses. In this paper, we employ certificate-less public key cryptography in synergy with the restrictive partially blind signature technique to construct a secure and privacy-aware proxy mobile IPv6 (SP-PMIPv6) protocol for V2G networks. SP-PMIPv6 achieves low authentication latency while protecting the identity and location privacy of the mobile EV. We evaluate the SP-PMIPv6 protocol in terms of its authentication overhead and the information-theoretic uncertainty derived by the mutual information metric to show the high level of achieved anonymity

XYZ Privacy

Future autonomous vehicles will generate, collect, aggregate and consume significant volumes of data as key gateway devices in emerging Internet of Things scenarios. While vehicles are widely accepted as one of the most challenging mobility contexts in which to achieve effective data communications, less attention has been paid to the privacy of data emerging from these vehicles. The quality and usability of such privatized data will lie at the heart of future safe and efficient transportation solutions. In this paper, we present the XYZ Privacy mechanism. XYZ Privacy is to our knowledge the first such mechanism that enables data creators to submit multiple contradictory responses to a query, whilst preserving utility measured as the absolute error from the actual original data. The functionalities are achieved in both a scalable and secure fashion. For instance, individual location data can be obfuscated while preserving utility, thereby enabling the scheme to transparently integrate with existing systems (e.g. Waze). A new cryptographic primitive Function Secret Sharing is used to achieve non-attributable writes and we show an order of magnitude improvement from the default implementation.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1708.0188

Towards Cyber Security for Low-Carbon Transportation: Overview, Challenges and Future Directions

In recent years, low-carbon transportation has become an indispensable part as sustainable development strategies of various countries, and plays a very important responsibility in promoting low-carbon cities. However, the security of low-carbon transportation has been threatened from various ways. For example, denial of service attacks pose a great threat to the electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid networks. To minimize these threats, several methods have been proposed to defense against them. Yet, these methods are only for certain types of scenarios or attacks. Therefore, this review addresses security aspect from holistic view, provides the overview, challenges and future directions of cyber security technologies in low-carbon transportation. Firstly, based on the concept and importance of low-carbon transportation, this review positions the low-carbon transportation services. Then, with the perspective of network architecture and communication mode, this review classifies its typical attack risks. The corresponding defense technologies and relevant security suggestions are further reviewed from perspective of data security, network management security and network application security. Finally, in view of the long term development of low-carbon transportation, future research directions have been concerned.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, accepted by journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Review