MCPAP: A MSIS-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocol for smart grids

The smart grid is considered a promising second-generation power grid because electricity service companies can use it to store energy more securely and deliver energy more efficiently. To protect the reliability of power consumption information and the privacy of users' identity information in a smart grid, many conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocols have been proposed in the last decade. However, these protocols are vulnerable to attacks from the quantum computer because of the large integer factorization problem or the discrete logarithm problem embedded in these protocols. To solve this problem, a security-enhanced conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocol is designed in this paper by using the module small integer solution problem. Besides, we show that our protocol has superior security in the random oracle model. The potential utility of this protocol in the smart grid is also demonstrated through our detailed performance analysis. Moreover, our protocol can use the batch verification method to improve its efficiency significantly.