MQTT Vulnerabilities, Attack Vectors and Solutions in the Internet of Things (IoT)

Hintaw, Ahmed J.; Manickam, Selvakumar; Aboalmaaly, Mohammed Faiz; Karuppayah, Shankar

doi:10.1080/03772063.2021.1912651

Cited by 47 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…1) Authentication vulnerabilities: If the MQTT broker does not conduct a proper examination of the identity of the publisher/subscriber and does not block multiple authentication attempts, the attackers can take advantage of these vulnerabilities to access MQTTdevices or run DoS attacks against the broker [150]. 2) Authorization vulnerabilities: The MQTT broker may not appropriately assign publishing and subscribing permissions for clients (i.e., devices).…”

Section: ) Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (Mqtt)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Security in the Internet of Things Application Layer: Requirements, Threats, and Solutions

et al. 2022

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Communication systems and networks are evolving as an integral part of not only of our everyday life but also as a part of the industry, fundamental infrastructures, companies, etc. Current directions and concepts, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), promise enhanced quality of life, greater business opportunities, cost-effective manufacturing, and efficient operation management through ubiquitous connectivity and deployment of smart physical objects. IoT networks are able to collect, preprocess, and transmit a huge amount of data. A considerable portion of this data is security-and privacycritical data, which makes IoT networks a tempting option for attackers. Given that these networks deal with the actual aspects of our lives and fundamental infrastructures (e.g. smart grids), cybersecurity in such networks is crucial. The large scale of these networks and their unique characteristics and complexity bring further vulnerabilities. In this study we give an introduction to IoT, focusing on the IoT application layer, security requirements, threats, and countermeasures in this layer, and some of the open issues and future research lines.

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Section: ) Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (Mqtt)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Security in the Internet of Things Application Layer: Requirements, Threats, and Solutions

et al. 2022

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“…This attack can be easily launched and it exploits the Last Will and Testament feature available in MQTT protocol [12]. This feature is used to notify other subscribers about an unexpected disconnected client.…”

Section: A Last Will Payload Flooding Attackmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through unauthorized publishing/subscription, the attackers can gain privileges that should not be available to them [12]. In fact, the wildcard feature (e.g.…”

Section: F Elevation Of Privilege Attackmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Assessment Platform of Cybersecurity Attacks against the MQTT Protocol using SIEM

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et al. 2022

2022 International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM)

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The industry of shared self-driving is increasingly interested in the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) solution to develop and evaluate their autonomous and shared mobility services. This solution would have the advantage of making data exchange easier between autonomous vehicles themselves and between vehicles and infrastructure. Nevertheless, there are a number of security threats due to the design and the use of the MQTT protocol. Some of these threats are denial of service (DoS), spoofing, information disclosure and data corruption. These security issues can be caused by external attackers as well as internal entities that are successfully authenticated. This paper analyzes the impact of these attacks on the performance of MQTT protocol with TLS in terms of CPU/RAM usage and latency. For that, we provide in this paper an in-depth overview of cybersecurity attacks that can disrupt the MQTT protocol and we also present an evaluation platform using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) architecture that automatically collects and aggregates system events from the server to assess the impact of the cyber attacks. The results indicate that these attacks have highly negative influence on the performance of broker. These results will contribute in the future to implement new countermeasures to improve cybersecurity of MQTT protocol.

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“…The paradigm of publish-subscribe is a promising design in the IoT arena because it allows clients to interact with one another through a centralized message broker [7], [8]. MQTT is widely utilized in publish-subscribe systems that employ IoT devices [9]. MQTT is considered as the data communications protocol that is most suited to the IoT because it can be simply deployed on devices that are low-cost, low-power, and low-storage [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Robust Security Scheme Based on Enhanced Symmetric Algorithm for MQTT in the Internet of Things

et al. 2023

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Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is expected to be the de facto messaging IoT standard. Therefore, MQTT must achieve efficient security. Nevertheless, the most significant drawback of the MQTT is its lack of protection mechanisms. Meanwhile, the existing approaches have added processing overhead to the devices and are still vulnerable to various attacks. Therefore, this research work presented an integrated scheme known as the Robust Security Scheme (RSS) to protect the MQTT against any exploitations that might result in sophisticated cyberattacks. The proposed RSS employs two cryptosystems:(1) a dynamic variant of the Advanced Encryption Standard (D-AES) and (2) Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE). RSS introduces a new design architecture of the symmetric AES algorithm to encrypt the MQTT payload called D-AES. Additionally, the second part of the proposed hybrid cryptosystem is KP-ABE, which is utilized to cipher the private key of the proposed D-AES to avoid the computation overhead of bilinear maps. The performance of the proposed RSS is measured in terms of processing time and traffic overhead. Additionally, the security aspects are evaluated in terms of balance, avalanche effect, and hamming distance and compared to the existing works in a testbed environment. Results revealed that the proposed D-AES is more promising with improvements than the standard AES algorithm. The proposed scheme achieves polymorphism while maintaining interoperability. RSS exhibited improvements over the standard AES algorithm by 8.75%, 10.45%, and 6.81% in terms of balance, avalanche effect, and hamming distance, respectively.

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MQTT Vulnerabilities, Attack Vectors and Solutions in the Internet of Things (IoT)

Cited by 47 publications

References 77 publications

Security in the Internet of Things Application Layer: Requirements, Threats, and Solutions

Security in the Internet of Things Application Layer: Requirements, Threats, and Solutions

An Assessment Platform of Cybersecurity Attacks against the MQTT Protocol using SIEM

A Robust Security Scheme Based on Enhanced Symmetric Algorithm for MQTT in the Internet of Things

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