Biblio

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that allows connection between devices using the internet to collect and exchange data with each other. Privacy and security have become the most pressing issues in the IoT network, especially in the smart home. Nevertheless, there are still many smart home devices that have not implemented security and privacy policies. This study proposes a remote sensor control system built on ESP32 to implement a smart home through the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport(MQTT) protocol by applying the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm with a 256-bit key. It addresses security issues in the smart home by encrypting messages sent from users to sensors. Besides ESP32, the system implementation also uses Raspberry Pi and smartphone with Android applications. The network was analyzed using Wireshark, and it showed that the message sent was encrypted. This implementation could prevent brute force attacks, with the result that it could guarantee the confidentiality of a message. Meanwhile, from several experiments conducted in this study, the difference in the average time of sending encrypted and unencrypted messages was not too significant, i.e., 20 ms.

This paper presents an overhead analysis of the use of digital signature mechanisms in the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol for three classes of constrained-device. Because the resources provided by constrained-devices are very limited, the purpose of this overhead analysis is to help find out the advantages and disadvantages of each class of constrained-devices after a security mechanism has been applied, namely by applying a digital signature mechanism. The objective of using this digital signature mechanism is for providing integrity, that if the payload sent and received in its destination is still original and not changed during the transmission process. The overhead analysis aspects performed are including analyzing decryption time, signature verification performance, message delivery time, memory and flash usage in the three classes of constrained-device. Based on the overhead analysis result, it can be seen that for decryption time and signature verification performance, the Class-2 device is the fastest one. For message delivery time, the smallest time needed for receiving the payload is Class-l device. For memory usage, the Class-2 device is providing the biggest available memory and flash.

The author considers the Internet of Things security problems, namely, the organization of secure access control when using the MQTT protocol. Security mechanisms and methods that are employed or supported by the MQTT protocol have been analyzed. Thus, the protocol employs authentication by the login and password. In addition, it supports cryptographic processing over transferring data via the TLS protocol. Third-party services on OAuth protocol can be used for authentication. The authorization takes place by configuring the ACL-files or via third-party services and databases. The author suggests a device discretionary access control model of machine-to-machine interaction under the MQTT protocol, which is based on the HRU-model. The model entails six operators: the addition and deletion of a subject, the addition and deletion of an object, the addition and deletion of access privileges. The access control model is presented in a form of an access matrix and has three types of privileges: read, write, ownership. The model is composed in a way that makes it compatible with the protocol of a widespread version v3.1.1. The available types of messages in the MQTT protocol allow for the adjustment of access privileges. The author considered an algorithm with such a service data unit build that the unit could easily be distinguished in the message body. The implementation of the suggested model will lead to the minimization of administrator's involvement due to the possibility for devices to determine access privileges to the information resource without human involvement. The author suggests recommendations for security policies, when organizing an informational exchange in accordance with the MQTT protocol.

With the growing use of the Robot Operating System (ROS), it can be argued that it has become a de-facto framework for developing robotic solutions. ROS is used to build robotic applications for industrial automation, home automation, medical and even automatic robotic surveillance. However, whenever ROS is utilized, security is one of the main concerns that needs to be addressed in order to ensure a secure network communication of robots. Cyber-attacks may hinder evolution and adaptation of most ROS-enabled robotic systems for real-world use over the Internet. Thus, it is important to address and prevent security threats associated with the use of ROS-enabled applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for securing ROS-enabled robotic system by integrating ROS with the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. We manage to secure robots' network communications by providing authentication and data encryption, therefore preventing man-in-the-middle and hijacking attacks. We also perform real-world experiments to assess how the performance of a ROS-enabled robotic surveillance system is affected by the proposed approach.

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.

Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is widely accepted as a data exchange protocol in Internet of Things (IoT) environment. For security, MQTT supports Transport Layer Security (MQTT-TLS). However, MQTT-TLS provides thing-to-broker channel encryption only because data can still be exposed after MQTT broker. In addition, ACL becomes impractical due to the increasing number of rules for authorizing massive IoT devices. For solving these problems, we propose MQTT Thing-to-Thing Security (MQTT-TTS) which provides thing-to-thing security which prevents data leak. MQTT-TTS also provides the extensibility to include demanded security mechanisms for various security requirements. Moreover, the transparency of MQTT-TTS lets IoT application developers implementing secure data exchange with less programming efforts. Our MQTT-TTS implementation is available on https://github.com/beebit-sec/beebit-mqttc-sdk for evaluation.

Internet of Things (IoT) stack models differ in their architecture, applications and needs. Hence, there are different approaches to apply IoT; for instance, it can be based on traditional data center or based on cloud computing. In fact, Cloud-based IoT is gaining more popularity due to its high scalability and cost effectiveness; hence, it is becoming the norm. However, Cloud is usually located far from the IoT devices and some recent research suggests using Fog-Based IoT by using a nearby light-weight middleware to bridge the gap and to provide the essential support and communication between devices, sensors, receptors and the servers. Therefore, Fog reduces centrality and provides local processing for faster analysis, especially for the time-sensitive applications. Thus, processing is done faster, giving the system flexibility for faster response time. Fog-Based Internet of Things security architecture should be suitable to the environment and provide the necessary measures to improve all security aspects with respect to the available resources and within performance constraints. In this work, we discuss some of these challenges, analyze performance of Fog based IoT and propose a security scheme based on MQTT protocol. Moreover, we present a discussion on security-performance tradeoffs.

Various communication protocols are currently used in the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. One of the protocols that are already standardized by ISO is MQTT protocol (ISO / IEC 20922: 2016). Many IoT developers use this protocol because of its minimal bandwidth requirement and low memory consumption. Sometimes, IoT device sends confidential data that should only be accessed by authorized people or devices. Unfortunately, the MQTT protocol only provides authentication for the security mechanism which, by default, does not encrypt the data in transit thus data privacy, authentication, and data integrity become problems in MQTT implementation. This paper discusses several reasons on why there are many IoT system that does not implement adequate security mechanism. Next, it also demonstrates and analyzes how we can attack this protocol easily using several attack scenarios. Finally, after the vulnerabilities of this protocol have been examined, we can improve our security awareness especially in MQTT protocol and then implement security mechanism in our MQTT system to prevent such attack.