DTLS based secure group communication scheme for Internet of Things

Multicast communication in IoT is prevalent in many applications like smart lighting, firmware update etc. In such applications a single multicast message is sent to all the group members. The group members respond with unicast messages. Multicasting saves energy, decreases network traffic by reducing the number of messages in the network. Security in multicasting is of the utmost importance due to its deployment in many sensitive applications and inherent properties of IoT network. In the literature, various solutions have been proposed to secure group communication. However, there is still no suitable approach that satisfies the secure multicasting need of IoT. In this paper we propose a DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) based secure group communication scheme. The proposed scheme is lightweight, scalable, and robust against member compromise. Moreover, the proposed scheme authenticates each group member and is also suitable for dynamic groups. The simulation results prove that the proposed scheme is more suitable for secure IoT framework in terms of energy and memory requirement than other related schemes.