Cryptographic Authentication of Battery Pack for Electric Vehicles

EV (Electric vehicles) are becoming more and more popular nowadays. According to ISO 26262, functional safety is defined as the “absence of unreasonable risk due to hazards caused by malfunctioning behavior of electrical/electronic systems”. Since electric vehicles are driven by a battery, a critical asset that needs to be protected to avoid malfunctioning behavior is the Vehicle Battery. A Hacker or attacker can intentionally manipulate/modify the information/signal coming from the battery to ECU; this is a huge risk for electric vehicle functionality and safety. A vehicle battery pack that is provided by the OEM, not only ensures the marginal power to be delivered to the ECU and the electric motor but is also designed with respect to the region it will operate in. For example, for the hot climatic region, proper safety measure is taken for overheating while designing the battery by the OEM. Thus, for a long-distance run, this risk and hazardous factor increase with respect to functional safety standards. Currently, there is no mechanism for securely protecting/authenticating the battery or battery information or battery charging authentication. This proposal discloses a way to authenticate the vehicle battery prior to use for the vehicle operator to ensure the protection of the critical asset. The ECU could also store the last battery data so that it could smartly detect any tempering happened in the battery by comparing the current data against it, which if the BMC fails to detect. It can be extended to authenticate every message request and transaction about battery data, both the party will validate the message tag/signature.