Trust your BMS: Designing a Lightweight Authentication Architecture for Industrial Networks

With the advent of clean energy awareness and systems that rely on extensive battery use, Battery Management Systems (BMSs) have seen an increased inclusion in modern complex systems like electric vehicles and power grids. This has presented a new set of security-related challenges. Security concerns arise when BMSs are intended to extend their communication with external systems, as their interaction can leave many backdoors open that potential attackers could exploit. Consequently, we explore and propose a security architecture solution intended for the authentication and session key establishment between BMS and other system devices. The aim of the proposed architecture is to be applicable in different industrial settings and systems, while at the same time keeping the design lightweight in nature. To achieve this, we use the implicit certificates with the ECQV schema. We show the applicability of the design through a security and performance analysis of our implemented test setup.