  Secure group-oriented communication is crucial to a wide range of
applications in Internet of Things (IoT). Security problems related to
group-oriented communications in IoT-based applications placed in a
privacy-sensitive environment have become a major concern along with the
development of the technology. Unfortunately, many IoT devices are designed to
be portable and light-weight; thus, their functionalities, including security
modules, are heavily constrained by the limited energy resources (e.g., battery
capacity). To address these problems, we propose a group key management scheme
based on a novel physically unclonable function (PUF) design: multistage
interconnected PUF (MIPUF) to secure group communications in an
energy-constrained environment. Our design is capable of performing key
management tasks such as key distribution, key storage and rekeying securely
and efficiently. We show that our design is secure against multiple attack
methods and our experimental results show that our design saves 47.33% of
energy globally comparing to state-of-the-art Elliptic-curve cryptography
(ECC)-based key management scheme on average.
