A Secure, Lightweight, and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for V2G Connections in Smart Grid

Vehicle to Grid (V2G) is a crucial technology that enables the bidirectional flow of communication between electric vehicles (EVs) and the smart grid (SG). Undoubtedly security and privacy are inherent requirements of these connections. In order to ensure seamless communications across EVs and the SG, privacy and anonymity of users, confidentiality of the transmitted data and location of the EVs must be guaranteed. Although several authentication schemes have been proposed in the literature to satisfy these requirements, the high mobility, sporadic connections, limited communication ranges, and large volumes of data pose significant challenges to achieve this goal. Therefore, authentication protocols for V2G networks must satisfy the critical requirements in terms of fast authentication while simultaneously guaranteeing the reliability and efficiency of transactions. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose an Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based privacy preserving scheme for V2G networks, which enables data sharing while maintaining the required level of security. The proposed scheme operates in 5 phases namely 1) system initialization, 2) EV registration, 3) mutual authentication and key exchange, 4) EV password change and 5) dynamic smart meter (SM) inclusion. Extensive evaluation on AVISPA demonstrate the safeness of the proposed scheme against different security threats. Further, detailed communication and computational analysis validate the efficacy of the proposed scheme in imparting high security features with limited overhead.