Detection of cyber attacks in electric vehicle charging systems using a remaining useful life generative adversarial network

Cybersecurity attacks targeting electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) and the broader electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem have become an escalating concern with the increasing adoption of EVs and the growing connectivity of the infrastructure supporting them. The present research aims to contribute to continuing cybersecurity studies on electric vehicle charging stations. In line with this objective, this study proposes the remaining useful life (RUL) approach to demonstrate the potential impact of estimating the remaining time of a cyber attack on EVSE and what revolutionary changes it can bring to cyber security strategies using a generative adversarial network (GAN). By taking a proactive stance, the manuscript will increase security and reduce the economic and reputational losses associated with cyber incidents. Accurate RUL estimates present valuable information about the status of the EVSE infrastructure. Thus, informed decisions on maintenance and crew scheduling are taken. To test the technique's effectiveness, we assess this approach on attack scenarios, including network and host attacks on the EV charger (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment-EVSE) in idle and charging states. Furthermore, we assess the prediction results of different deep learning models, such as gated recurrent units (GRUs), long short-term memory (LSTM), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), convolution neural networks (CNNs), multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and dense layer integrated with generative adversarial networks (GANs), using mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), mean squared error (MSE), and R-squared (R²). Afterward, we compare the error measurements with models, such as hybrid GAN-LSTM, GAN-GRU, GAN-RNN, GAN-CNN, GAN-MLP, and GAN-Dense Layer. The GAN-GRU model exhibits the highest accuracy with the lowest MAE (0.0281). On the contrary, the GAN-CNN model displays the best overall performance concerning error consistency and variance explained. According to the results, integrating GAN into these architectures improves predictive accuracy and the model's ability to identify potential attacks in advance and decreases error rates.