Profiling Electric Vehicles via Early Charging Voltage Patterns

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Marchiori, Francesco, Donadel, Denis, Brighente, Alessandro, Conti, Mauro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Marchiori, Francesco
Donadel, Denis
Brighente, Alessandro
Conti, Mauro
author_facet Marchiori, Francesco
Donadel, Denis
Brighente, Alessandro
Conti, Mauro
contents Electric Vehicles (EVs) are rapidly gaining adoption as a sustainable alternative to fuel-powered vehicles, making secure charging infrastructure essential. Despite traditional authentication protocols, recent results showed that attackers may steal energy through tailored relay attacks. One countermeasure is leveraging the EV's fingerprint on the current exchanged during charging. However, existing methods focus on the final charging stage, allowing malicious actors to consume substantial energy before being detected and repudiated. This underscores the need for earlier and more effective authentication methods to prevent unauthorized charging. Meanwhile, profiling raises privacy concerns, as uniquely identifying EVs through charging patterns could enable user tracking. In this paper, we propose a framework for uniquely identifying EVs using physical measurements from the early charging stages. We hypothesize that voltage behavior early in the process exhibits similar characteristics to current behavior in later stages. By extracting features from early voltage measurements, we demonstrate the feasibility of EV profiling. Our approach improves existing methods by enabling faster and more reliable vehicle identification. We test our solution on a dataset of 7408 usable charges from 49 EVs, achieving up to 0.86 accuracy. Feature importance analysis shows that near-optimal performance is possible with just 10 key features, improving efficiency alongside our lightweight models. This research lays the foundation for a novel authentication factor while exposing potential privacy risks from unauthorized access to charging data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_07714
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Profiling Electric Vehicles via Early Charging Voltage Patterns
Marchiori, Francesco
Donadel, Denis
Brighente, Alessandro
Conti, Mauro
Cryptography and Security
Emerging Technologies
Machine Learning
Electric Vehicles (EVs) are rapidly gaining adoption as a sustainable alternative to fuel-powered vehicles, making secure charging infrastructure essential. Despite traditional authentication protocols, recent results showed that attackers may steal energy through tailored relay attacks. One countermeasure is leveraging the EV's fingerprint on the current exchanged during charging. However, existing methods focus on the final charging stage, allowing malicious actors to consume substantial energy before being detected and repudiated. This underscores the need for earlier and more effective authentication methods to prevent unauthorized charging. Meanwhile, profiling raises privacy concerns, as uniquely identifying EVs through charging patterns could enable user tracking. In this paper, we propose a framework for uniquely identifying EVs using physical measurements from the early charging stages. We hypothesize that voltage behavior early in the process exhibits similar characteristics to current behavior in later stages. By extracting features from early voltage measurements, we demonstrate the feasibility of EV profiling. Our approach improves existing methods by enabling faster and more reliable vehicle identification. We test our solution on a dataset of 7408 usable charges from 49 EVs, achieving up to 0.86 accuracy. Feature importance analysis shows that near-optimal performance is possible with just 10 key features, improving efficiency alongside our lightweight models. This research lays the foundation for a novel authentication factor while exposing potential privacy risks from unauthorized access to charging data.
title Profiling Electric Vehicles via Early Charging Voltage Patterns
topic Cryptography and Security
Emerging Technologies
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07714