Blockchain-based Secure EV Charging System

The demand for electronic vehicles (e-vehicle) is drastically increasing in the recent times. However, the customer details for the charging of e-vehicles should be securely stored to prevent malicious and unintended access or manipulations, which may otherwise have an impact on the overall e-vehicle charging system. In traditional charging system, manual charging by the eligible and valid customers is in existence in because of majority of the chargings hailing from rural areas and unavailability of efficient technological access. However, these systems may lead to repudiation and fraudulent access by intruders due to anonymity of users. To overcome all these difficulties, a secure blockchain based system for efficient charging mechanism is proposed in this work, where transparency is ensured across all the participating entities by getting them all connected across the blockchain network. The work is developed to allow the deployment of a e-vehicle charging application that will help to keep track of the person who made a charging into the smart contract. The charging details are encrypted before storing in the blockchain and the time taken to carry out the encryption process for a varying set of customers is recorded. Experimental results are obtained by creation of an e-vehicle smart contract across both permissionless, and permissioned environments and the time taken to store and retrieve the eligible customers documents is analyzed. From the results, it is identified that the permissionless network such as ethereum poses a threat to security and non-repudiation aspects which can be overcome in the permissioned networks like hyperledger fabric as used to develop this work. It is also observed that as the number of eligible customers increases, the time taken to encrypt is also increased in a linear manner. The work is developed on a hyperledger fabric environment that serves to be a permissioned one, thereby strengthening the overall security of the e-vehicle chargings made across the network.