Securing vehicle-to-grid communications in the smart grid

Using vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services, battery vehicles (BVs) may help the smart grid alleviate peaks in power consumption. However, wireless communications infrastructure between BVs and the smart grid also introduce severe and unprecedented security vulnerabilities. In this article, we discuss V2G network architectures and present state-of-the-art security, including different security challenges during V2G power and communications interactions. Then we report on our context-aware authentication solution for V2G communications in the smart grid. Finally, we describe several open issues for secure V2G networks.