RESEARCH AND DESIGN OF LIGHTWEIGHT ENCRYPTION FOR MQTT PROTOCOL

Yanping Pan, Xiaohui Cheng, Congcong Xia

ABSTRACT: MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol based on publish/subscribe model, which is a transmission protocol for mobile devices designed specifically for network unreliable and limited resources. The emergence of MQTT protocol increases the timeliness of information acquisition in practical application, and replaces traditional drawing with push method to carry out message transmission. Its emergence provides a new way for the realization of message push on Android platform. Due to the lightweight property of the MQTT protocol, there is no encryption control for message push, instead of sending the original bytecode directly. The methods are no built-in encryption, which has some security risks. In this paper, the lightweight encryption algorithms of ECC, DES and TEA are compared and analyzed, and the lightweight features and encryption requirements takes into account. Finally, the TEA encryption algorithm is selected by the paper. The TEA algorithm’s superior encryption performance is verified on the message delivery platform based on the MQTT protocol. The results show that TEA can meet the basic requirements of the li ghtweight encryption algorithm.

Keywords: MQTT, publish/subscribe, lightweight encryption, TEA algorithm