Attack Scenarios and Security Analysis of MQTT Communication Protocol in IoT System

Abstract

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. Keywords-attack; MQTT; protocol; scenario I. INTRODUCTION Internet of Things (IoT) or inter-machine communication (M2M) over the internet is a concept that allows communication between devices over the Internet. The number of IoT devices is growing rapidly where Cisco IBSG predicts the number of IoT devices will reach 50 billion by 2020 [1]. Moreover, Gartner predicts, by 2020, the internet of things devices will be made up of 20.4 billion units [2]. IoT plays a major role in smart city implementation like smart home, smart transportation, and smart parking. Nowadays, many protocols are used as a communication protocol in the IoT devices. Five of the most prominent protocols used for IoT is Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), and MQ Telemetry Protocol (MQTT) [3]. Some considerations that must be taken into account when we choose the protocol are energy efficiency (total consumed energy for the given execution time), performance (total transmission time it takes to send messages and receive their acknowledgments), resource usage (CPU, RAM, and ROM usage), and reliability (ability to avoid packet loss, i.e. QoS) [4]. Moreover, when advanced functionalities (e.g. message persistence, wills, and exactly once delivery), reliability, and ability to secure multicast message are highly considered, MQTT protocol is one of the best options [5].

Online-Semisupervised Neural Anomaly Detector to Identify MQTT-Based Attacks in Real Time

“…e proposed work aims to create a digital security system linked to the IoT/IIoT and in particular to the MQTT communication protocol to give the research and industrial community a fully realistic framework for its use and implementation. e most relevant dataset that simulates communication and transaction modes in IoT/IIoT, as well as the associated MQTT-based attacks [12,13], was chosen for the most accurate and realistic picture of how M2M communication works. Specifically, the selected dataset came from the recording of IoT network sensor data based on the application of the MQTT protocol, as applied in real automation conditions in a smart home environment.…”

“…In this sense and recognizing not only the necessity of use but also the vulnerabilities that characterize the communication based on the MQTT protocol, this paper presents an online-semisupervised learning neural anomaly detection system to detect MQTT-based attacks, without special requirements and resources [13].…”

Blockchain and smart contract for IoT enabled smart agriculture

“…The data accumulated in our system is primarily stored in the MQTT server. MQTT lacks security in some of its steps, where it does not encrypt the data (Andy, Rahardjo & Hanindhito, 2017). As one of our main motives for this work is to increase the transparency of the trackable data of agricultural products, tamperproofing the historical data is a must.…”

Exploiting Internet of Things Protocols for Malicious Data Exfiltration Activities

“…Different attack scenarios are considered as parts of five main categories: DoS, identity spoofing, information disclosure, elevation of privileges, data tampering. [24] considers other MQTT attack classes: attacks against data privacy, authentication and data integrity, port obscurity and botnet over MQTT. [25], [26] propose instead novel security attacks against MQTT, by implementing low-rate denial of service attacks, an emerging category of threats making use of lowbandwidth rate to make a network service unavailable to its intended users.…”