Securing MQTT-M2M Communications in a Food Retail Distribution

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.