Cybersecurity of Hybrid Electric City Bus With V2C Connectivity

Abstract

Leveraging cloud computing resources and previews in intelligent transportation systems to improve electric city buses (ECBs) energy system performance is an emerging topic. However, internet connectivity will expose the ECB to cyberattacks, which will cause service interruption and downstream financial implications. In this study, detection and protection systems are designed under a proposed architecture for ECBs with Vehicle-to-Cloud connectivity to address the denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The analysis conducted in this paper shows that the distributed DDoS attack is most crucial because it is easy to be launched and hard to be defended. By overwhelming traffics with spam, DDoS attacks can easily cut off the vehicle connection to cloud servers and disable all (compromised and surviving) ECBs that rely on vehicle-to-cloud connectivity. The simulation results indicate that, even though 99.9% of ECBs in the system are compromised and converted to attacking sources, with the proposed security systems in the cloud, the blocking probability between servers and surviving filed devices is kept below 28.08%. Besides, for a surviving field device protected by the proposed approach, harsh DDoS attacks only degrade the energy efficiency and battery life performance of the tested energy management system by 0.2288% when compared to the benchmark results.