Abstract The future Internet, known as Information-Centric Networking (ICN), is a realistic solution to content delivery between the content request generators (subscribers) and the server (publisher) in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment due to caching contents by in-network nodes. However, significant redundant copies of contents can be cached in this kind of network which, besides numerous advantages, introduces some undesirable features, such as security issues, content redundancy, access control, and cache overflow among others. ICN has different modules, such as mobility, routing, and caching, which are utmost important for the IoT network due to the nature of energy-constrained IoT devices. While numerous attempts are presently being made to institutionalize this emerging paradigm, careful considerations are needed to caching module at the early stage of this architecture. This is important instead of holding up until the innovation gets used and experienced. In this article, we first list some of the important features and limitations of the ICN-based IoT caching and then propose an ICN caching strategy that fits well in the energy efficient and secure IoT environment. The proposed strategy is simulated and compared with the ProbCache mechanism with regards to energy consumption and bandwidth utilization. Preliminary experimental analyses demonstrate that the proposed strategy produces better results than the ProbCache as long as the cache size of network nodes is increased.