Smart Card-based Access Control System using Isolated Many-to-Many Authentication Scheme for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) trend has been adopted very quickly. The rapid growth of IoT has increased the need for physical access control systems (ACS) for IoT devices, especially for IoT devices containing confidential data or other potential security risks. This research focused on many-to-many ACS, a type of ACS in which many resource-owners and resource-users are involved in the same system. This type of system is advantageous in that the user can conveniently access resources from different resource-owners using the same system. However, such a system may create a situation where parties involved in the system have their data leaked because of the large number of parties involved in the system. Therefore, ‘isolation’ of the parties involved is needed. This research simulated the use of smart cards to access electric vehicle (EV) charging stations that implement an isolated many-to-many authentication scheme. Two ESP8266 MCUs, one RC522 RFID reader, and an LED represented an EV charging station. Each institute used a Raspberry Pi Zero W as the web and database server. This research also used VPN and HTTPS protocols to isolate each institute’s assets. Every component of the system was successfully implemented and tested functionally.