Improved attribute-based encryption using chaos synchronization and its application to MQTT security

Abstract

In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) has developed rapidly and been widely used in industry, agriculture, e-health, smart cities, and families. As the total amount of data transmission will increase dramatically, security will become a very important issue in data communication in the IoT. There are many communication protocols for Device to Device (D2D) or Machine to Machine (M2M) in IoT. One of them is Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), which is quite prevalent and easy to use. MQTT is designed for resource-constrained devices, so its security is not as strong as other communication protocols. To enhance MQTT security, it needs an additional function to overcome its weakness. However, considering the limited computational abilities of resource-constrained devices, they cannot use too powerful or complicated cryptographic algorithms. Therefore, this paper proposes novel improved attribute-based encryption (ABE) integrated with chaos synchronization to enhance the MQTT security. Finally, a small size of IoT is implemented to simulate resource-constrained devices equipped with a human-machine interface and monitoring software to show and verify the performance of MQTT communication with this improved ABE algorithm.