The increased use of smart Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEV) opened a new area of research and development. The number of EV charging sites has considerably increased in residential as well as in public areas. Within these EV charging sites, various entities need to communicate in a secure and efficient way. The Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) offers a way to coordinate this communication and is already being used in many implementations. However, only the latest OCPP 2.0 version of the protocol includes certain security features. In this article, we present the entities that take part in an OCPP-based smart charging scenario, we identify security issues and threats and present solutions that have been proposed by scholars. We identify open security issues for OCPP and propose future research directions for the security enhancement of the protocol.

One of the barriers for the adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) is the anxiety around the limited driving range. Recent proposals have explored charging EVs on the move, using dynamic wireless charging which enables power exchange between the vehicle and the grid while the vehicle is moving. In this article, we focus on the intelligent routing of EVs in need of charging so that they can make most efficient use of the so-called Mobile Energy Disseminators (MEDs) which operate as mobile charging stations. We present a method for routing EVs around MEDs on the road network, which is based on constraint logic programming and optimization using a graph-based shortest path algorithm. The proposed method exploits Inter-Vehicle (IVC) communications in order to eco-route electric vehicles. We argue that combining modern communications between vehicles and state of the art technologies on energy transfer, the driving range of EVs can be extended without the need for larger batteries or overtly costly infrastructure. We present extensive simulations in city conditions that show the driving range and consequently the overall travel time of electric vehicles is improved with intelligent routing in the presence of MEDs.

We propose a set of optimization techniques for transforming a generic AI codebase so that it can be successfully deployed to a restricted serverless environment, without compromising capability or performance. These involve (1) slimming the libraries and frameworks (e.g., pytorch) used, down to pieces pertaining to the solution; (2) dynamically loading pre-trained AI/ML models into local temporary storage, during serverless function invocation; (3) using separate frameworks for training and inference, with ONNX model formatting; and, (4) performance-oriented tuning for data storage and lookup. The techniques are illustrated via worked examples that have been deployed live on geospatial data from the transportation domain. This draws upon a real-world case study in intelligent transportation looking at on-demand, real-time predictions of flows of train movements across the UK rail network. Evaluation of the proposed techniques shows the response time, for varying volumes of queries involving prediction, to remain almost constant (at 50 ms), even as the database scales up to the 250M entries. The query response time is important in this context as the target is predicting train delays. It is even more important in a serverless environment due to the stringent constraints on serverless functions’ runtime before timeout. The similarities of a serverless environment to other resource constrained environments (e.g., IoT, telecoms) means the techniques can be applied to a range of use cases.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV), whereby interconnected vehicles that communicate with each other and with road infrastructure on a common network, has promising socio-economic benefits but also poses new cyber-physical threats. To protect these entities and learn about adversaries, data on attackers can be realistically gathered using decoy systems like honeypots. Admittedly, honeypots introduces a trade-off between the level of honeypot-attacker interactions and incurred overheads and costs for implementing and monitoring these systems. Deception through honeypots can be achieved by strategically configuring the honeypots to represent components of the IoV to engage attackers and collect cyber threat intelligence. Here, we present HoneyCar, a novel decision support framework for honeypot deception in IoV. HoneyCar benefits from the repository of known vulnerabilities of the autonomous and connected vehicles found in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) database to compute optimal honeypot configuration strategies. The adversarial interaction is modelled as a repeated imperfect-information zero-sum game where the IoV network administrator strategically chooses a set of vulnerabilities to offer in a honeypot and a strategic attacker chooses a vulnerability to exploit under uncertainty. Our investigation examines two different versions of the game, with and without the re-configuration cost, to empower the network administrator to determine optimal honeypot investment strategies given a budget. We show the feasibility of this approach in a case study that consists of the vulnerabilities in autonomous and connected vehicles gathered from the CVE database and data extracted from the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).

In this paper we describe the application of a learning classifier system (LCS) variant known as the eXtended classifier system (XCS) to evolve a set of ‘control rules’ for a number of Boolean network instances. We show that (1) it is possible to take the system to an attractor, from any given state, by applying a set of ‘control rules’ consisting of ternary conditions strings (i.e. each condition component in the rule has three possible states; 0, 1 or #) with associated bit-flip actions, and (2) that it is possible to discover such rules using an evolutionary approach via the application of a learning classifier system. The proposed approach builds on learning (reinforcement learning) and discovery (a genetic algorithm) and therefore the series of interventions for controlling the network are determined but are not fixed. System control rules evolve in such a way that they mirror both the structure and dynamics of the system, without having ‘direct’ access to either.