Enabling Lightweight Device Authentication in Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Protocol

Abstract

Recent advancements in IoT have led to emergence of fascinating breakthroughs in diverse applications. Nowadays, the use-cases of smart home systems are augmenting as they provide functionalities like real-time monitoring and high degree of remote control. MQTT protocol is one of the most widely used messaging protocols in IoT-based applications including smart homes. This protocol lacks required security features owing to which, the intruders can launch variety of attacks easily. Stirred by this, we proposed a lightweight device authentication scheme for MQTT protocol. In this work, publisher/ subscriber, and broker use lightweight cryptographic operations to enable device authentication. Also, this mechanism utilizes the lightweight cryptographic keys such as One-time Key (𝑶𝑻 𝑲𝒆𝒚 ) and Tokens (𝑻 𝒊 ) to complete registration and authentication process respectively. Compared to other protocols, our approach reduces both communication and computation costs while maintaining the security demands. We put a prototype into practice to assess the performance of the proposed authentication mechanism. Further, we perform the formal analysis of the proposed authentication mechanism using AVISPA protocol analyzer tool. The proposed security mechanism is resistant to various attacks such as replay attack, device impersonate attack, malicious node attack, etc., and it enables the security features like device authentication and device anonymity in smart homes.