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Abstract In the IoT context, there is an increasing demand for privacy. Indeed, IoT devices can collect and transmit sensitive data that can reveal users’ behavior and preferences to third parties. Making the identity of devices anonymous is one of the privacy challenges. In this paper, we address this problem by referring to the MQTT protocol. MQTT is a widely adopted publish-subscribe model tailored for low-end devices. In particular, we propose an approach to achieve anonymity guarantees in MQTT against a global network adversary. Our approach takes inspiration from mixnet-based anonymous protocols, but it is appropriately tailored for MQTT clients. Indeed, our solution has the following features: (1) it is lightweight for MQTT clients, (2) it satisfies the decoupling principles, and (3) it guarantees that subscribers can join and leave the system at any time. By analyzing the security of the proposed approach, we demonstrate that the considered adversary, via known attacks, is unable to reduce its uncertainty in identifying the originator (publisher) or the recipient (subscriber) of a message. We conducted an experimental campaign showing that the strong benefits of anonymity provided by our solution come at the cost of latency with respect to state of the art which offers lower anonymity guarantees. However, this price is acceptable for the amount of bytes typically sent by IoT devices.

Covert channel methods are techniques for improving privacy and security in network communications. These methods consist of embedding secret data within normal network channels, making it more difficult for unauthorized parties to detect such data. This paper presents a new approach for creating covert channels using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, widely used in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). The proposed method exploits storage channels by altering the field length of MQTT messages. Our solution leverages well-known one-way mathematical functions to ensure that data remain hidden from third parties observing the MQTT stream. In this way, we ensure that not only the content of the communication is preserved but also that the communication itself takes place. We conducted a security analysis to show that our solution offers the above-mentioned property even against severe threats, such as an adversary being able to observe all the messages exchanged in the network (even in the clear). Finally, we conducted an overhead analysis of our solution both in terms of the time required to perform the required operations and of the bytes to send. Our study shows that our solution adds no significant time overhead, and the additional overhead in terms of transmitted bytes remains within acceptable limits.

Ensuring accountability and integrity in MQTT communications is important for enabling several IoT applications. This paper presents a novel approach that combines blockchain technology and the interplanetary file system (IPFS) to achieve non-repudiation and data integrity in the MQTT protocol. Our solution operates in discrete temporal rounds, during which the broker constructs a Merkle hash tree (MHT) from the messages received. Then the broker publishes the root on the blockchain and the MHT itself on IPFS. This mechanism guarantees that both publishers and subscribers can verify the integrity of the message exchanged. Furthermore, the interactions with the blockchain made by the publishers and the broker ensure they cannot deny having sent the exchanged messages. We provide a detailed security analysis, showing that under standard assumptions, the proposed solution achieves both data integrity and accountability. Additionally, we provided an experimental campaign to study the scalability and the throughput of the system. Our results show that our solution scales well with the number of clients. Furthermore, from our results, it emerges that the throughput reduction depends on the integrity check operations. However, since the frequency of these checks can be freely chosen, we can set it so that the throughput reduction is negligible. Finally, we provided a detailed analysis of the costs of our solution showing that, overall, the execution costs are relatively low, especially given the critical security and accountability benefits it guarantees. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the higher the number of subscribers in the system, the lower the costs per client in our solution. Again, this confirms that our solution does not present any scalability issues.

Anonymous service delivery has attracted the interest of research and the industry for many decades. To obtain effective solutions, anonymity should be guaranteed against the service provider itself. However, if the full anonymity of users is implemented, no accountability mechanism can be provided. This represents a problem, especially when referring to scenarios in which a user, protected by anonymity, may perform illegally when leveraging the anonymous service. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution to the trade-off between anonymity and accountability. In particular, our solution relies on three independent parties (one of which is the service provider itself) such that only the collaboration of all three actors allows for the disclosure of the real identity of the user. In all other cases, anonymity is guaranteed. To show the feasibility of the proposal, we developed a prototype with user-friendly interfaces that minimize the client-side operations. Our solution is then also effective from the point of view of usability.

Tor is the de facto standard used for anonymous communication over the Internet. Despite its wide usage, Tor does not guarantee sender anonymity, even in a threat model in which the attacker passively observes the traffic at the first Tor router. In a more severe threat model, in which the adversary can perform traffic analysis on the first and last Tor routers, relationship anonymity is also broken. In this paper, we propose a new protocol extending Tor to achieve sender anonymity (and then relationship anonymity) in the most severe threat model, allowing a global passive adversary to monitor all of the traffic in the network. We compare our proposal with Tor through the lens of security in an incremental threat model. The experimental validation shows that the price we have to pay in terms of network performance is tolerable.