With the rapid growth of the communication technology, intelligent terminals (i.e. PDAs and smartphones) are widely used in many mobile applications. To provide secure communication in mobile environment, in recent years, many user authentication schemes have been proposed. However, most of these authentication schemes suffer from various attacks and cannot provide provable security. In this paper, we propose a novel remote user mutual authentication scheme for multi-server environments using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Unlike other ECC-based schemes, the proposed scheme uses ECC in combination with a secure hash function to protect the secure communication among the users, the servers and the registration center (RC). Through this method, the proposed scheme requires less ECC-based operations than the related schemes, and makes it possible to significantly reduce the computational cost. Security and performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed scheme can solve various types of security problems and can meet the requirements of computational complexity for low-power mobile devices.