Cyber-Physical Security of Electric Vehicles With Four Motor Drives

In recent years, the cyber-physical security of power electronics systems has become increasingly prominent. In this article, we present a vulnerability assessment and a coordinated detection method to improve the cyber-physical security of electric vehicles with four motor drives, which is one of the emerging power electronics applications. As the lateral stability control system (LSCS) is designed through the yaw moment generated by the torque deviation between distributed motors, cyber-threats to motor drives will cause vehicle instability and hence life-threatening consequences. In response to this issue, we propose a set of innovative index-based metrics to evaluate the performance degradation due to cyber-physical attacks on the LSCS and motor drives. Evaluation results, including both transient and statistic results, are provided for a variety of threat scenarios. To further improve the cyber-physical security of the electric vehicle, we propose a coordinated detection methodology that combines the state observer and the proposed evaluation metrics. The simulation results have validated the effectiveness of the proposed detection method.