An Authentication Framework for Electric Vehicle-to-Electric Vehicle Charging Applications

Electric vehicles are becoming parts of our daily lives with the increasing investment from auto industry. However, their charging is an issue as this requires frequent charging and longer waiting times compared to traditional gasoline-based vehicles. The charging is typically done at residential or public charging stations. With the increased dominance of electric vehicles, one potential solution is to exploit vehicle-to-vehicle charging (V2V) where an electric vehicle can charge another one through a converter-cable assembly. In such cases, however, there needs to be a protocol between the charge supplier and receiver to authenticate each other and authorize the vehicle to open its charging ports. In this paper, we study this problem of authentication and propose a protocol that will utilize key exchange among the users without relying on certificates. We implemented the proposed protocols under WiFi-direct and Bluetooth and demonstrated that the approach can provide the necessary framework of communication before charging starts without any additional overhead.