Securing MQTT-M2M Communications in a Food Retail Distribution

• Main Authors: Spina, Mattia Giovanni, Tropea, Mauro, De Rango, Floriano
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Dictionaries; ECC; Food Retail Distribution; Forgery; Internet of Things; IoT; M2M; MQTT; Proposals; Security; Sensor phenomena and characterization
• ISSN: 2331-9860
• DOI: 10.1109/CCNC51664.2024.10454863

IoT devices are becoming more pervasive and integrated within our everyday lives, and networks of these devices are able to help humans accomplish complex and critical tasks. In such a network, IoT devices cooperate using Machine-to-Machine ( M2M ) communications to carry out such tasks. It becomes vital, therefore, to protect such a type of communication most often carried out by resource-constrained devices that cannot afford the overhead of a standard security protocol such as TLS. In this paper, a security framework for MQTT-M2M communications is proposed, considering a smart food retail shop use case. Specifically, we considered SlowIte, Data Forgery, Man-In-The-Middle, and Dictionary attacks that target the communication among the smart devices of food retail shop, proposing a mitigation method for each of them. To prove the benefits the proposal can provide, in terms of CPU/RAM utilization and network bandwidth consumption, we compared it with the baseline MQTT security standard, i.e. TLS.