There are two popular mechanisms for encrypting data: Asymmetric encryption and Symmetric encryption. This approach needs a broker plugin which decrypts the messages on-the-fly. (Please read our post about TLS to make sure you understand the risks of not using TLS!) Trusted subscribers are connected via a secure channel (TLS) and are allowed to receive the data in plain text. This may be a good alternative if TLS is not an option and you want to protect important data from eavesdroppers on the publishing side. The broker is able to decrypt the message before distributing it, so all subscribers receive the unencrypted message. Client-to-brokerĪ client-to-broker approach ensures that the payload of the message is encrypted in the communication between the client and the broker. If you can’t use authentication and authorization mechanisms or you are using a public broker such as the MQTTDashboard, E2E encryption can protect your application data from malicious usages. If an attacker gets access to an MQTT packet (for example, due to improperly set up authentication and authorization or missing TLS), the attacker can’t decrypt the data without the decryption keyĮ2E encryption is independent of the broker implementation and can be applied to any topic by any MQTT client. Only trusted clients have access to the decryption key of the data. While the MQTT broker uses the unencrypted packet metadata for routing and quality of service handling, the application data itself stays encrypted and the broker cannot read the encrypted data. This approach ensures that the encrypted data stays encrypted all the time. Encryption scenarios End-to-end (E2E) encryption Our recommendation is to stick with LWT and PUBLISH payload encryption. It is also possible to implement a custom broker plugin for decryption, so that the following data on the client side can be encrypted: ![]() Usually, MQTT payload encryption is only applied to MQTT PUBLISH packets. This ensures, that there is no custom mechanism needed on the broker side for decrypting the data (in fact, you may want to prevent the broker to do that if you’re using encryption!). Text encodings are typically more bloated than the raw byte representation.Īll MQTT PUBLISH metadata stays intact and only the payload of the message is encrypted. If you need to save additional bandwidth, this is an important point. Since MQTT payloads are always binary, it’s not necessary to encode the encrypted message to a textual representation such as base64 (technically speaking, the message is usually a raw byte array after encryption). This type of encryption is not defined in the MQTT specification and is completely application specific. While the message metadata such as the MQTT Topic stays intact, the payload of the message gets encrypted ( you can read more about topics in this post). This approach allows end-to-end encryption of application data even on untrusted environments. MQTT Payload encryption is the encryption of application-specific data on the application level (typically, the MQTT PUBLISH packet payload or the CONNECT LWT payload). You will learn how payload encryption can be applied to MQTT and how this application-level encryption adds an additional layer of security in untrusted MQTT environments. ![]() ![]() The topic for this post is MQTT Payload encryption. Welcome to the eight part of the MQTT Security Fundamentals series.
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