A secure and privacy-preserving communication protocol for V2G networks

The concept of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) is that electric vehicles (EVs) communicate with the smart grid to sell demand response services by delivering electricity into the grid. The operation of V2G networks is based on continuously monitoring the status of individual EVs as well as a designed incentive scheme to attract sufficient participating EVs. However, the close monitoring might raise privacy concerns from the EV owners about identity and location information leakage. To the best of the authors' knowledge, V2G communication protocol with privacy-preserving has been proposed rarely in the literature. Therefore, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving communication protocol for V2G networks, which utilizes the restrictive partially blind signature to protect the identities of the EV owners and is also based on certificateless public key cryptography to simplify the certificate management as in traditional public key infrastructure and to overcome the key escrow problem as in identity-based public key cryptography. The proposed protocol can achieve the property of completeness, identity and location privacy, confidentiality and integrity of the communications, and known-key security, and is secure against the replay attacks and existential adaptively chosen message attacks.