Scalable Identity and Key Management for Publish-Subscribe Protocols in the Internet-of-Things

Publish-Subscribe protocols such as the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol are considered scalable, lightweight, and one-size-fits-all solutions for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) networking. MQTT has been widely adopted in the Industrial IoT to automate distributed power grid equipment such as smart meters and sensors. Such protocols are being adopted rapidly, without much attention being paid to security. Although these protocols support client-side TLS certificates, operators of ten do not enable these features, fearing performance and availability issues. Moreover, managing these certificates would be yet another challenging problem.