On the overhead of using zero-knowledge proofs for electric vehicle authentication

Abstract

As Electric Vehicles (EVs) are becoming widely available, their secure management is crucial to fully enable their potential. For instance, for convenient charging, they may require quick authentication with the charging stations while they are on the go. As charging is frequently needed, exposing one's charging frequency to the stations may risk the exposure of privacy for the EV driver. Therefore, a mechanism is needed to hide EV information. In this paper, we propose using zero-knowledge proofs to achieve this goal. While zero-knowledge proofs can provide anonymous authentication, they require computation for generation of witnesses. Therefore, we assess the overhead of generating a witness and proof computation at the resource constrained on-board units (OBUs) which are deployed on EVs that utilize wireless communications for scheduling. The results indicate that computation overhead is minimal and can be delployed on resource contrained devices.