A Lightweight PUF-Based Protocol for Dynamic and Secure Group Key Management in IoT

In many Internet of Things (IoT) applications, resource-constrained devices often collaborate in groups for the acquisition, transmission, and management of sensitive information. To uphold the security of these operations, symmetric encryption algorithms are commonly employed due to their efficiency and speed. Nevertheless, establishing a key management mechanism, that accommodates the distinctive features of the IoT domain, remains an ongoing challenge. This article introduces Group-Key PHEMAP, a novel physically unclonable function (PUF)-based protocol for group key management in IoT applications. The proposed protocol relies solely on lightweight operations for group key management and supports dynamic membership without leveraging additional cryptographic keys. We present a formal demonstration for security properties and a comprehensive analysis, regarding both computational and communication costs, as well as scalability property concerning the growing number of devices within the group. Finally, we validate the suitability of our proposal by resorting to the ns-3 network simulator, and, by implementing the protocol on devices representing typical characteristics of those used in IoT applications.