The Day After Mirai: A Survey on MQTT Security Solutions After the Largest Cyber-attack Carried Out through an Army of IoT Devices

Perrone, Giovanni; Vecchio, Massimo; Pecori, Riccardo; Giaffreda, Raffaele

doi:10.5220/0006287302460253

Cited by 60 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Nevertheless, it is often up to the developer to choose the mechanisms most appropriate to the specific application requirements. In addition, as pointed out by Perrone et al [22], the standard mainly refers to simple scenarios and does not discuss details of complex scenarios, such as broker interconnections and synchronization mechanisms between brokers. Therefore, these issues require additional research efforts.…”

Section: Mitigationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security of IoT Application Layer Protocols: Challenges and Findings

Nebbione

Calzarossa

2020

Future Internet

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IoT technologies are becoming pervasive in public and private sectors and represent presently an integral part of our daily life. The advantages offered by these technologies are frequently coupled with serious security issues that are often not properly overseen or even ignored. The IoT threat landscape is extremely wide and complex and involves a wide variety of hardware and software technologies. In this framework, the security of application layer protocols is of paramount importance since these protocols are at the basis of the communications among applications and services running on different IoT devices and on cloud/edge infrastructures. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of application layer protocol security by presenting the main challenges and findings. More specifically, the paper focuses on the most popular protocols devised in IoT environments for messaging/data sharing and for service discovery. The main threats of these protocols as well as the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) for their products and services are analyzed and discussed in detail. Good practices and measures that can be adopted to mitigate threats and attacks are also investigated. Our findings indicate that ensuring security at the application layer is very challenging. IoT devices are exposed to numerous security risks due to lack of appropriate security services in the protocols as well as to vulnerabilities or incorrect configuration of the products and services being deployed. Moreover, the constrained capabilities of these devices affect the types of security services that can be implemented.

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Section: Mitigationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security of IoT Application Layer Protocols: Challenges and Findings

Nebbione

Calzarossa

2020

Future Internet

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“…Most of the works related to MQTT protocol available in the literature focus on performance evaluation (Fehrenbach, 2017;Gündoğan et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2013;Luzuriaga et al, 2015;Scalagent, 2015;Thangavel et al, 2014;Yokotani & Sasaki, 2016), proposing security enhancements to the existing protocol (Mektoubi et al, 2016;Shin et al, 2016;Singh et al, 2015), formal modelling (Aziz, 2016;Houimli et al, 2017) and security evaluation (Andy et al, 2017;Firdous et al, 2017;Perrone et al, 2017).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our work is different from the study presented in Fehrenbach (2017) as the focus of this work is on modelling DoS attacks by varying the parameters in control packets and assessing their impact on various MQTT brokers and deployment scenarios. Perrone et al (2017) presented a security analysis of MQTT protocol and described the various security requirements for IoT deployments. In another work, Andy et al Andy et al (2017) presented some attack scenarios as well as a security analysis of the MQTT protocol.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Denial of service attack detection through machine learning for the IoT

Syed

Baig

Ibrahim

et al. 2020

Journal of Information and Telecommunication

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Sustained Internet of Things (IoT) deployment and functioning are heavily reliant on the use of effective data communication protocols. In the IoT landscape, the publish/subscribe-based Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is popular. Cyber security threats against the MQTT protocol are anticipated to increase at par with its increasing use by IoT manufacturers. In particular, IoT is vulnerable to protocol-based Application layer Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, which have been known to cause widespread service disruption in legacy systems. In this paper, we propose an Application layer DoS attack detection framework for the MQTT protocol and test the scheme on legitimate and protocol compliant DoS attack scenarios. To protect the MQTT message brokers from such attacks, we propose a machine learning-based detection framework developed for the MQTT protocol. Through experiments, we demonstrate the impact of such attacks on various MQTT brokers and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework to detect these malicious attacks. The results obtained indicate that the attackers can overwhelm the server resources even when legitimate access was denied to MQTT brokers and resources have been restricted. In addition, the MQTT features we have identified showed high attack detection accuracy. The field size and length-based features drastically reduced the false-positive rates and are suitable in detecting IoT based attacks.

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“…According to the review presented in [11] the botnet network Mirai has challenged the world society in the context of cyberattacks, when devices gained unauthorized access to other devices to execute a malicious code. The authors pointed out the main security mechanisms that must be employed to prevent such incidents.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As presented in [1,11,12,25,26], it is suggested to employ the TLS protocol to provide secure authentication between devices and the gateway. This protocol has two stages.…”

Section: Algorithmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Authentication algorithm for internet of things networks based on MQTT protocol

Dikii

2020

Serb J Electr Eng

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The authentication algorithm for machine-to-machine communication devices via the MQTT Protocol is considered, which allows verifying the device legality without sending the password. The algorithm protects the Internet of things network from unauthorized access, ensures confidentiality by generating a common session key, and provides protection against attacks of the "man in the middle" and others. The obtained experiment results showed noticeable performance improvement compared to the TLS Protocol. The cryptographic strength of the proposed algorithm is based on the discrete logarithm problem. The main advantage of the algorithm is the ability to authenticate in one requestresponse cycle.

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The Day After Mirai: A Survey on MQTT Security Solutions After the Largest Cyber-attack Carried Out through an Army of IoT Devices

Cited by 60 publications

References 7 publications

Security of IoT Application Layer Protocols: Challenges and Findings

Security of IoT Application Layer Protocols: Challenges and Findings

Denial of service attack detection through machine learning for the IoT

Authentication algorithm for internet of things networks based on MQTT protocol

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