Abstract
Recently, a three-factor authentication scheme for smart grid environment was published by Wazid et al., with the claim that their scheme is secure against various known attacks such as the reply attack, man-in-the-middle attack, user and smart meter impersonation attacks, etc. However, this paper will show that Wazid et al.’s scheme cannot resist the smart meter impersonation attack, and it also has the severe design defects that the trusted authority knows all registered users’ individual secrets, and all smart meters share the same individual secret used for authentication which eventually results in its vulnerability to the smart meter impersonation attack. Then, based on Wazid et al.’s scheme, an improved authentication and key agreement protocol is designed to eliminate these security weaknesses. The improved scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model. Moreover, further security attributes discussion is also given in this paper, which demonstrates that the improved scheme achieves expected security attributes including perfect forward secrecy, user anonymity, etc., and secure against the reply attack, man-in-the-middle attack, user and smart meter impersonation attacks, etc.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, and the editor for the patience and hard work for this paper. This work was supported in part by the Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi Province of China (No. 2021JQ-123), and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 31020200QD011).
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Qi, M. An improved three-factor authentication and key agreement protocol for smart grid. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 14, 16465–16476 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-022-03871-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-022-03871-4