EVECTOR: An orchestrator for analysing attacks in electric vehicles charging system
Devki Nandan Jha, Tomasz Szydlo, Nima Valizadeh, Ringo Sham, Aleksandra Edwards, Amrit Kumar, Amanjot Kaur, Bo Wei, Vijay Kumar, Kai Li Lim, Rajiv Ranjan, Omer Rana
TL;DR
EVECTOR tackles the problem of insufficient end-to-end tools to assess security and performance in electric vehicle charging ecosystems by orchestrating multiple open-source simulators (including Everest and protocol stacks) through a modular framework. It introduces an Attack Orchestrator and a MongoDB-backed logging schema to enable realistic cyber-physical and cyber-only attack scenarios, validated via broken wire and OCPP fuzzification case studies. The contributions include the EVECTOR architecture and implementation, a reusable class-based design with MQTT-based telemetry, and an integrated attack-injection workflow that yields actionable insights into vulnerabilities and resilience. The results demonstrate EVECTOR’s capability to orchestrate complex scenarios and reveal how attacks propagate across layers, informing better security planning and defense mechanisms for EV charging infrastructure.
Abstract
Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure is critical for the widespread adoption of EVs, ensuring efficient and secure charging processes. Evaluating the security and performance of EV charging systems in real-world infrastructure poses significant challenges due to the diversity of information exchange between vehicles and charging stations/Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE), including complex network protocols, scale of deployment and a variety of potential threats. Existing simulation frameworks are unable to handle complex security scenarios across these differing data exchange protocols. In this paper, we propose a novel EV orchestration framework: EVECTOR, which addresses the limitations of existing simulation systems by enabling both quantitative and qualitative analyses of EV charging scenarios. EVECTOR also provides a flexible attack orchestrator to simulate realistic attack behaviours on EV charging infrastructure. We validate the EVECTOR framework through two case studies: (a) cyber-physical attacks such as broken wire; and (b) cyber-specific attacks such as frame fuzzification. The case studies highlight the effectiveness of EVECTOR in providing deeper insights into the security and performance of EV charging systems.