Extremely Lightweight Group Key Distribution Schemes for Resource-Constrained IoT Environments

There are numerous group key distribution schemes available to ensure the security of group communication in the Internet of Things(IoT). However, the majority of these schemes fail to address the issue of limited resources for IoT devices, which are unable to execute increasingly complex applications. We introduce a novel encoding method for designing group key distribution schemes, which makes the public string and the group key of our new schemes can be generated very efficiently. The first scheme is designed using the new encoding method and pre-shared pairwise keys. It is information-theoretic, non-interactive, and only involves logical computations such as XOR and Neg. Then, we extend our method to an authentication scheme by proposing a novel approach to utilizing the traditional message authentication code (MAC) for authentication purposes. Performance analysis reveals significant improvements in computation and communication efficiency compared to existing schemes, making our approach suitable for resource-constrained IoT environments.