Efficient MQTT Platform Facilitating Secure Group Communication

Abstract

Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) has become one of the most popular Internet-of-Things (IoT) communication protocols, owing to its high efficiency and simplicity. However, it does not support the desirable security functions; instead, it assumes the use of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) in the lower layer. Unfortunately, it is too costly to support SSL/TLS for many low-end IoT devices, and SSL/TLS does not support secure group communications. Group communications are popular in many IoT application scenarios [1-2, 28] and in many MQTT scenarios; for example, a message generator needs to share its data to many interested receivers. In this paper, we propose and implement a secure MQTT group communications, based on our previous secure MQTT key agreement scheme [26]. Comprehensive experiments have been performed and evaluated. The results confirm that the proposed scheme and implementation greatly improves the communication latencies of MQTT applications.