Ensemble-based Intrusion Detection System for Electric Vehicles Charging Stations using Machine Learning

Abstract

Traditional Vehicles have an adverse effect on the environment. Therefore, the current technological shift is constantly seeking an alternative to replace traditional vehicles fueled by fossil fuels, and Electric vehicles are, so far, the best alternative. The adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) is growing rapidly due to their eco-friendly benefits and technological advancements. This growth, however, brings a significantly larger attack surface due to increased interconnectivity between electric vehicles, charging stations and the smart grid system. To prevent such types of attacks, we need a robust system to detect them beforehand and prevent the system from being compromised. Although some prior work has been conducted in this area, their approaches did not incorporate deep learning algorithms, nor did they evaluate model performance under noisy data conditions. Therefore, we proposed a novel ensemble-based intrusion detection system (IDS) to detect these attacks in Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCS). We implement different Machine learning algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors (KNN), Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Decision Tree (DT). Moreover, as different types of malwares often exhibit distinct structural characteristics when visualized as images, we also use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to detect such attacks and malware. We are focusing on detecting attacks in Electric vehicle charging stations by analyzing the network traffic. For this, we utilize the latest labelled dataset, the Canadian Institute of Cybersecurity EV Charger Attack Dataset 2024 (CICEVSE2024), which is a multidimensional dataset containing both benign and attack data. We then evaluate & compare the performance of these algorithm in detecting the network traffic attacks in Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCS). Our proposed model employs an ensemble voting strategy to combine the predictions from different classifiers, thereby improving the system's robustness and accuracy, and achieves an accuracy of 99.5% in detecting cyberattacks. With the addition of small noise to the dataset, a few individual classifiers perform poorly; however, the ensemble model still maintains an accuracy of 99.2%.