Cryptanalysis and Improvement of a Mutual Authentication Scheme for Smart Grid Communications

Smart grid (Sg) is an enhanced electrical power grid that helps regulate power distribution and communication among the users and the service providers. The upsurged growth of communication technologies intensifies the monitoring abilities of Sg by utilizing its bidirectional communication properties, which further contribute to meet users’ real-time demands. Smart grid technology is reliable and highly efficient. However, user-server bidirectional communication shouldn’t be exposed to various cyberattacks. Recently, a mutual authentication scheme for smart grid communications has been devised by Khan et al. (J King Saud Univ Comput Inform Sci, 2019). Unfortunately, we have found some design flaws, such as lack of mutual authentication between the user-server and no session key agreement in the proposed scheme. Also, the scheme does not withstand offline password-guessing attacks, user impersonation attacks, and replay attacks. Thus, to alleviate the existing issues, we have devised an improved authentication scheme. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed scheme is secure against all possible types of security attacks by performing an informal security analysis.