AbstractBecause of the evolution of mobile devices and networks, users can now access a network at any moment, in whatever place with a smart card. User authentication using smart card is a technique in which server checks the legality of a user between insecure channel, which avoid the peril of eavesdropping. Today, the user authentication schemes are proposed several ways. As schemes are proposed and analyzed for several years, way to authentication is also diversifying such as chaotic map and elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. Recently, new authentication scheme is proposed which uses Markov Chain. The proposed scheme is explained that can resist several hazard of security such as reflection attack, forgery attack, parallel‐session attack. However, we refer that existing scheme is still insecure to protect some several security attack such as user impersonation attack, off‐line password guessing attack, and so on, so the existing scheme is unsuitable for real implementation. To fix these security flaws, we recommend an efficient and robust authentication scheme, which protects all the identified flaws of existent scheme. Furthermore, our propose scheme is more efficient and covers the identified vulnerability of existing scheme; therefore, our proposed scheme is more suitable to apply real‐life application. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.