Security Assessment of the MQTT-SN Protocol for the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing globally at a fast pace. However, the expansion of the IoT paradigm has brought with it the challenge of promptly detecting and evaluating attacks against these systems. The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is one of the most used protocols in the IoT scenario due to its lightness. The MQTT-SN protocol, which is an even lighter version of MQTT, is specially designed for embedded devices on non-TCP/IP networks. This paper presents an exhaustive assessment of the MQTT-SN protocol and describes its shortcomings, which can allow an attacker to compromise the security of the entire IoT infrastructure. We have designed 3 different attacks in order to allow us to evaluate the different security impacts on a real MQTT-SN network. All the attacks were implemented and tested, and we show how they work and their impact on performance. Furthermore, a non-attacked scenario was also implemented to allow us to compare the performance of an attacked system with that of system without attacks.