It is easy to think of a public charger as a glorified outlet. It is not. A modern charging station is a networked computer that moves serious power, processes payments, talks to the vehicle, communicates with a back-end network, and increasingly coordinates with the grid. Every one of those interfaces is an attack surface. A 2022 ABB grant treats the charger as what it is — a security-sensitive networked device — and is about detecting when something abnormal is happening to it.
The record: on May 17, 2022, ABB Schweiz AG was granted US11336662B2, “Technologies for detecting abnormal activities in an electric vehicle charging station.” The CPC classes are explicitly security classes — H04L 63/1416, 63/1425, and 63/1441 (network intrusion and anomaly detection) — combined with charging classes B60L 53/14, 53/31, 53/63, 53/665. This is cybersecurity for the charger.
Here is the mechanism. The system establishes what normal operation looks like — normal communication patterns, power flows, session behavior — and watches for deviations. Abnormal activity might be a tampering attempt, a fraudulent session, a malformed message from a compromised device, or a fault behaving suspiciously. Detecting the anomaly lets the network respond: flag it, isolate the station, or shut down the affected behavior before it causes harm or loss.
Why does charger security matter beyond the obvious? Because chargers sit at a sensitive junction. They handle money, so fraud is a direct cost. They handle high power, so tampering is a safety risk. And as bidirectional charging and grid coordination grow, a compromised population of chargers could become a vector for attacks on the grid itself. The charger is critical infrastructure, and critical infrastructure has to detect intrusion.
Trace it to the product and the significance is trust at scale. A charging network's value is reliability and safety, and both depend on the stations not being subverted. A network that cannot detect abnormal activity is a network waiting for a fraud wave or a safety incident. That an industrial-power and automation company like ABB patents charger anomaly detection reflects that charging infrastructure is being engineered to the standards of the critical systems it increasingly resembles.
The caveat: a granted anomaly-detection method is a technique, not a guarantee against every attack, and security is a moving target. But it reframes charging usefully. Uptime is the metric that matters, and uptime now includes resilience against tampering and attack, not just hardware reliability. The car is ready and the grid is ready; a 2022 ABB grant is about keeping the networked computer in between trustworthy.