Decentralized Identifier-based Privacy-preserving Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol for Electric Vehicle Charging in Smart Grid

Abstract: The popularity of Electric Vehicles (EVs) has been rising across the globe in recent years. Smart grids will be the backbone for EV charging and enable efficient consumption of electricity by the EVs. With the demand for EVs, associated cyber threats are also increasing. Users expose their personal information while charging their EVs, leading to privacy threats. This paper proposes a user-empowered, privacy-aware authenticated key exchange protocol for EV charging in smart grid. The proposed protocol is based on the concept of Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs). The use of DIDs empowers users by helping them to have complete control over their identities. The charging station and the user verify that the other party is legitimate before proceeding with the charging services using VC. Key recovery is another issue we address in this paper. A method to recover lost keys is incorporated into the proposed protocol. We present formal security proof and informal analysis to show that protocol's robustness against several attacks. We also provide a detailed performance analysis to show that the proposed protocol is efficient.