  Internet of Things (IoT) networks are becoming a part of our daily lives, as
the number of IoT devices around us are surging. The authentication of millions
of connected things and the distribution and management of secret keys between
these devices pose challenging research problems. Current one-to-one
authentication schemes do not take the resource limitations of IoT devices into
consideration. Nor do they address the scalability problem of massive machine
type communication (mMTC) networks. Group authentication schemes (GAS), on the
other hand, have emerged as novel approaches for many-to-many authentication
problems. They can be used to simultaneously authenticate numerous
resource-constrained devices. However, existing GAS are not energy efficient,
and they do not provide enough security for widespread use. In this paper, we
propose a lightweight GAS that significantly reduces energy consumption on
devices, providing almost 80% energy savings when compared to the
state-of-the-art solutions. Our approach is also resistant to the replay and
man-in-the-middle attacks. The proposed approach also includes a solution for
key agreement and key distribution problems in mMTC environments. Moreover,
this approach can be used in both centralized and decentralized group
authentication scenarios. The proposed approach has the potential to address
the fast authentication requirements of the envisioned agile 6G networks,
supported through aerial networking nodes.
