A Secure Scheme for Group Communication of Wireless IoT Devices

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to significantly advance the technology development in many application domains such as agriculture, home automation, and healthcare. However, in the IoT era, this development faces serious research challenges in terms of handling large amounts of data, designing efficient system architectures, and implementing appropriate mechanisms for privacy and security assurance. Especially the network security aspect of the IoT is of major importance due to huge amounts of data that the IoT is expected to generate and handle, and considering the limited resources of typical IoT devices. One of the serious security threats are the physical attacks on the IoT devices that operate in remote locations. These are known in the literature as the node capture attacks. Motivated by the aforementioned issues, this paper first introduces the background of IoT security and discusses the related challenges. Next, a secure group communication scheme that enables IoT using low energy wireless IP network is described. The proposed approach is based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing scheme, which has been enhanced to enable secure group-to-group communication of resource-constrained IoT devices. In particular, we consider the low energy wireless IP networking technology as one of the IoT enablers and the problem of mitigating the negative effects of node capture attacks on IoT devices. Simulation results show significant improvements of the proposed scheme over the traditional public-key based approach.