Electric Vehicle Charging: A Survey on the Security Issues and Challenges of the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP)

The increased use of smart Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEV) opened a new area of research and development. The number of EV charging sites has considerably increased in residential as well as in public areas. Within these EV charging sites, various entities need to communicate in a secure and efficient way. The Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) offers a way to coordinate this communication and is already being used in many implementations. However, only the latest OCPP 2.0 version of the protocol includes certain security features. In this article, we present the entities that take part in an OCPP-based smart charging scenario, we identify security issues and threats and present solutions that have been proposed by scholars. We identify open security issues for OCPP and propose future research directions for the security enhancement of the protocol.