Vulnerabilities and Limitations of MQTT Protocol Used between IoT Devices

Abstract

With the proliferation of smart devices capable of communicating over a network using different protocols, each year more and more successful attacks are recorded against these, underlining the necessity of developing and implementing mechanisms to protect against such attacks. This paper will review some existing solutions used to secure a communication channel, such as Transport Layer Security or symmetric encryption, as well as provide a novel approach to achieving confidentiality and integrity of messages. The method, called Value-to-Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (Value-to-HMAC) mapping, uses signatures to send messages, instead of encryption, by implementing a Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code generation algorithm. Although robust solutions exist that can be used to secure the communication between devices, this paper considers that not every Internet of Things (IoT) device or network design is able to afford the overhead and drop in performance, or even support such protocols. Therefore, the Value-to-HMAC method was designed to maximize performance while ensuring the messages are only readable by the intended node. The experimental procedure demonstrates how the method will achieve better performance than a symmetric-key encryption algorithm, while ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of information through the use of one mechanism.

Security of IoT Application Layer Protocols: Challenges and Findings

“…In the literature, many papers focus on TLS with the objective of devising implementations more suitable to MQTT-enabled IoT devices (see, e.g., [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]). For example, to ensure message confidentiality and integrity, Dinculeana et al [28] propose an approach based on the Blake2 algorithm [34]. This approach-very promising in terms of performance on constrained devices-is particularly appropriate in industrial environments where sensors and controllers exchange predictable data.…”

A Software Architecture for the Industrial Internet of Things—A Conceptual Model

“…In order to achieve requirements related to the interaction between things, a middleware system that provides support for publish-subscribe communication can be used. At the moment, there are several middleware systems that operate on the publisher-subscriber paradigm, such as the advanced message-queuing protocol (AMQP) [ 49 ], message-queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) [ 50 ], and data distribution service (DDS) for real-time systems [ 51 ]. We focused on middleware systems that are based on the publish-subscribe paradigm because the IIoT system will be much more versatile.…”

Integrated Functional Safety and Security Diagnosis Mechanism of CPS Based on Blockchain

“…Krishna K V [12] and Venkatasubramanian et al [13] added the physical environment information gathered by the CPS sensors to the key negotiation and identity authentication technologies of CPS itself, utilized the fact that CPS can closely interact with the physical environment to its own advantage. However, the above works are directed to the separate protection and analysis of safety or security, which has been unable to meet the increasing security requirements of CPS [14].…”

“…Taking the base plate module as an example, provided by the manufacture, the FMEDA forms including the device name, label, function, failure mode, failure impact, importance, and various failure data are sorted according to function classification, and the sub-units of the base plate module are more detailed: such as the control unit, power supply unit, NCSF bus unit, USB unit, LCD screen unit, BOOT selector switch failure data, as shown in Table 4. Bring into the formula (13) and (14), you can get the percentage of dangerous failures and the diagnostic coverage DC of each module sub-unit on the base plate.…”