Broker Bridging Mechanism for Providing Anonymity in MQTT

Abstract

With the growth of the number of smart devices the range of fields where they are used is growing too, and it is essential to protect the communication between them. In addition to data integrity and confidentiality, for which standard mechanisms exists, a security service that may also be required is anonymity, allowing entities to communicate with each other in such a way that no third party knows that they are the participants of a certain message exchange. In this paper we propose a mechanism for creating anonymous communications using MQTT protocol. The design of our solution is based on dynamic broker bridging mechanism and allows clients to subscribe and to publish to a topic remaining incognito.