Flexible and Efficient Security Framework for Many-to-Many Communication in a Publish/Subscribe Architecture

Abstract

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a lightweight publish/subscribe protocol, which is currently one of the most popular application protocols in Internet of Things (IoT) thanks to its simplicity in use and its scalability. The secured version, MQTTS, which combines MQTT with the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, has several shortcomings. It only offers one-to-one security, supports a limited number of security features and has high computation and communication costs. In this paper, we propose a flexible and lightweight security solution to be integrated in MQTT, addressing many-to-many communication, which reduces the communication overhead by 80% and the computational overhead by 40% for the setup of a secure connection on the client side.