A Lightweight Anonymous Mobile User Authentication Scheme for Smart Grid

Smart Grid (SG) technology has been developing for years, which facilitates users with portable access to power through being applied in numerous application scenarios, one of which is the electric vehicle charging. In order to ensure the security of the charging process, users need authenticating with the smart meter for the subsequent communication. Although there are many researches in this field, few of which have endeavored to protect the anonymity and the untraceability of users during the authentication. Further, some studies consider the problem of user anonymity, but they are non-light-weight protocols, even some can not assure any fairness in key agreement. In this paper, we first points out that existing authentication schemes for Smart Grid are neither lack of critical security nor short of important property such as untraceability, then we propose a new two-factor lightweight user authentication scheme based on password and biometric. The authentication process of the proposed scheme includes four message exchanges among the user mobile, smart meter and the cloud server, and then a security one-time session key is generated for the followed communication process. Moreover, the scheme has some new features, such as the protection of the user's anonymity and untraceability. Security analysis shows that our proposed scheme can resist various well-known attacks and the performance analysis shows that compared to other three schemes, our scheme is more lightweight, secure and efficient.