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Due to efficiency, security and reliability, the smart grid attracts more and more attentions from both industry and researchers. To implement secure communication in the smart grid, how to distribute secret keys among participants become an important issue. Several key distribution schemes for the smart grid have been proposed to guarantee secure communication. However, most of them cannot provide smart meter anonymity or have unsatisfactory performance. Based on the identity‐based cryptography, this study proposes an anonymous key distribution (AKD) scheme for the smart grid using the elliptic curve cryptography. The proposed AKD scheme can provide the smart meter anonymity and mutual authentication between two participants without any help of the trusted anchor. Due to the fact that no bilinear paring operation is involved in the execution, the proposed AKD scheme has much better performance than the latest AKD scheme proposed by Tsai and Lo. Detailed performance analysis shows that the computation and the communication costs of the authors’ AKD scheme is about 82.39 and 52.33% less than that of Tsai and Lo's AKD scheme. Besides, security analysis shows that the proposed AKD scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model.
He et al. (Mon,) studied this question.