Authentic Batteries: A Concept for a Battery Pass Based on PUF-enabled Certificates

The European Union’s Green Deal and other similar regulations advocate to reuse batteries of electrical vehicles (”second life”) to reduce greenhouse gases. To ease the assessment of the best fitting second life applications for a distinctly used battery, product life cycle data plays an important role. A digital battery pass will be mandatory for future batteries and will contain such data collected throughout the product’s life cycle. Having trustworthy data is one key element of the battery pass in order to provide authentic batteries. This paper presents a concept to securely bind the pass to the battery itself by using physical unclonable functions for creating a unique identifier per battery. The approach is based on certificates and makes use of Certificate Transparency to foster trust in the issued certificates. Attacks on product life cycle data or certificates and counterfeiting batteries can be detected.