Protocol Recommendation for Message Encryption in MQTT

As per Gartner's forecast, around 25 billion things will be connected to Internet by 2020. Devices connected in open Internet poses the most security risks, and this can impact smart homes, connected cars and other cloud connected devices. A majority of such devices use Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), but it has very limited authentication capabilities. Further, it does not support encryption, unless the traffic is directed through secure tunnels like Transport Layer Security (TLS). But TLS is computing intensive, requires a heavy stack and is not suitable for low power devices. There are several WiFi micro controllers used in IoT applications, which cannot support such heavy requirements of TLS, and thus applications built on such microcontrollers have no security built into them, and are vulnerable to attacks. Considering these aspects, this research paper focuses on how to enhance the security aspects of this MQTT protocol. It is proposed to achieve this enhanced security by using lightweight message encryption approach.