Subject

Second Promotor INDI: Prof. An Braeken
Electric vehicles clearly are the future.
Charging electric vehicles happens through charge points, and the protocols that are used between then have some interesting properties.
The industry standard protocol is OCPP1.6, a hardware-independent interoperable protocol.
These protocols however pose some limitations: they assume public charge passes, which makes them inflexible.

Another inflexibility is w.r.t. the future energy market: charging systems and energy grids need to flexibly consider energy prices, demand, and supply, always taking into consideration the demands of the consumer: if I want my car to be ready by 6am, it needs to be ready by 6am irregardless of demand and supply.

All these promising and interesting features need to seriously consider the privacy of the consumer and producer.
Dumping juiced dinosaurs into a fuel car is relatively anonymous authenticating with a charge point requires some thinking about identification and payment protocols.

Kind of work

Investigate properties, possibilities and limitations of OCPP1.6 and competing protocols.
Investigate and report the current privacy and security protocols and properties,
focussing on possible short comings in terms of protocol features,
and proposing privacy features.
Implementation of said privacy features as a proof-of-concept for benchmarking and demonstration.

Framework of the Thesis

Thesis is in cooperation with GoWatts (gowatts.be).

Number of Students

3

Expected Student Profile

Interest in privacy, cryptography and network protocols.