Lightweight Security for MQTT-SN

M H Amaran,H Hashim,L H Adnan,N N Mohamed,M S Rohmad

doi:10.14419/ijet.v7i4.11.20811

Abstract

This study discusses a method to secure Message Queuing Telemetry Transport-Sensor network (MQTT-SN). MQTT-SN is a popular data communication protocol used in developing IoT applications and can be secured by augmenting it with a security scheme. In this work, several lightweight encryption schemes to be used in tandem with MQTT-SN were tested and analysed. The best algorithm is identified based on the speed of encryption and overall power consumption when implemented in IoT environment. It was found that L-BLOCK is the overall performer in securing MQTT-SN and should be highly considered when developing IoT applications.

Highlights

Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept wherein physical things are interconnected to form an intelligent environment
High energy and computational cost comes from ancient security and communication protocols which were originally designed for computers and regular devices, not IoT devices
One Raspberry Pi (RPi) serves as the client node and another RPi serves as the gateway

Summary

Introduction

Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept wherein physical things are interconnected to form an intelligent environment. This shows that vulnerable IoT devices post serious threat to the internet. High energy and computational cost comes from ancient security and communication protocols which were originally designed for computers and regular devices, not IoT devices. These drawbacks caused the manufacturers to abandon the security protocol altogether since the IoT device are not able to support the security protocol, due to it being restricted by battery capacity and/or computation power. In addition to long packet header, another cost of implementing security comes from the usage of large symmetric block cipher algorithms. An obvious solution to the problem would be to use a shorter secure symmetric block cipher suited for IoT devices, which is partly what is being proposed in this paper

Lightweight Block Ciphers

LBLOCK

PRESENT

Results and Discussion

Conclusion