Secure and Efficient MQTT Group Communication Design

Abstract

To facilitate the successful deployments of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the support of secure and efficient communication protocol and architecture is inevitable. Owing to its lightweight and easiness, the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) has become one of the most popular communication protocols in the Internet-of-Things (IoT). However, the security supports in the MQTT are very weak: it assumes the security support from the underlying Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The weakness incurs several key drawbacks. One is the support of SSL capacities is a pressure for those resources-constrained devices. One another and very important one is the lack of the support of secure group communication. Without efficient and secure group communication support, the MQTT-based IoT systems would suffer from deteriorated computational and communication performance, especially when there are tons of IoT devices accessing the systems. In this paper, we design a secure MQTT group communication framework in which each MQTT application would periodically updates the group key and the data communication can be efficiently and securely encrypted by the group keys. Both our prototype system and the analysis show that our design can improve the performance of security, computation, and communication.