Security Analysis of a Communication Protocol: MQTT

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 15 May 2026] Security Analysis of a Communication Protocol: MQTT Ricardo Venâncio, Clarisse Sousa, Filipe Duarte, Luís Ribeiro This paper analyzes the security of the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). The main objective consists of identifying vulnerabilities and proposing security improvements. Adopting a hybrid methodology, a theoretical review was combined with an experimental demonstration in a simulated Smart Home environment. Eavesdropping, Tampering, Denial of Service (DoS), and Brute Force attacks were executed and analyzed. The results evidenced critical risks due to the absence of robust encryption and authentication. Finally, mitigation strategies and best practices are proposed to strengthen MQTT implementations. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2605.15804 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.15804v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15804 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Clarisse Andreia Soares Sousa [view email] [v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 09:58:57 UTC (269 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)