To fully support information management among various stakeholders in smart grid domains, how to establish secure communication sessions has become an important issue for smart grid environments. In order to support secure communications between smart meters and service providers, key management for authentication becomes a crucial security topic. Recently, several key distribution schemes have been proposed to provide secure communications for smart grid. However, these schemes do not support smart meter anonymity and possess security weaknesses. This paper utilizes an identity-based signature scheme and an identity-based encryption scheme to propose a new anonymous key distribution scheme for smart grid environments. In the proposed scheme, a smart meter can anonymously access services provided by service providers using one private key without the help of the trusted anchor during authentication. In addition, the proposed scheme requires only a few of computation operations at the smart meter side. Security analysis is conducted to prove the proposed scheme is secure under random oracle model. Index Terms-Identity-based encryption, identity-based signature, key distribution, privacy, smart grid.

In modern societies, the number of mobile users has dramatically risen in recent years. In this paper, an efficient authentication scheme for distributed mobile cloud computing services is proposed. The proposed scheme provides security and convenience for mobile users to access multiple mobile cloud computing services from multiple service providers using only a single private key. The security strength of the proposed scheme is based on bilinear pairing cryptosystem and dynamic nonce generation. In addition, the scheme supports mutual authentication, key exchange, user anonymity, and user untraceability. From system implementation point of view, verification tables are not required for the trusted smart card generator (SCG) service and cloud computing service providers when adopting the proposed scheme. In consequence, this scheme reduces the usage of memory spaces on these corresponding service providers. In one mobile user authentication session, only the targeted cloud service provider needs to interact with the service requestor (user). The trusted SCG serves as the secure key distributor for distributed cloud service providers and mobile clients. In the proposed scheme, the trusted SCG service is not involved in individual user authentication process. With this design, our scheme reduces authentication processing time required by communication and computation between cloud service providers and traditional trusted third party service. Formal security proof and performance analyses are conducted to show that the scheme is both secure and efficient.

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