Secure MQTT for Internet of Things (IoT)

TLDR

Rapid digital innovations are driving global IoT deployment, yet existing protocols such as CoAP, MQTT, and MQTT‑SN lack built‑in security, raising device and D2D communication concerns. The authors aim to create a secure MQTT and MQTT‑SN variant, SMQTT and SMQTT‑SN, by integrating key/ciphertext policy‑attribute based encryption with lightweight elliptic‑curve cryptography. They augment MQTT with a key/ciphertext policy‑attribute based encryption scheme built on lightweight elliptic‑curve cryptography to provide end‑to‑end security. Simulations confirm SMQTT and SMQTT‑SN are feasible for diverse IoT use cases and demonstrate competitive performance.

Abstract

Rapid innovations in the area of digital things and Information Communication Technology are driving rapid deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) around the globe. Device to Device communications (D2D) in IoT are envisaged through various protocols such as Constrained Access Protocol (CoAP), Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and MQTT-SN (for sensor networks). One of the major concerns in the deployment of IoT is to ensure the security of devices and D2D communications. Besides, existing communication protocols for IoT are devoid of security features. To address this, we propose a secure version of MQTT and MQTT-SN protocols (SMQTT and SMQTT-SN) in which security feature is augmented to the existing MQTT protocol based on Key/Cipher text Policy-Attribute Based Encryption(KP/CP-ABE) using lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Further we demonstrate feasibility of SMQTT and SMQTT-SNprotocols for various IoT requirements through simulations and evaluate their performance.