SecureHealth IoT: Ensuring Lightweight Security in MQTT Communication for Resource Constrained Devices Using Xor-HMAC Encryption

MQTT has gained widespread adoption as an IoT communication protocol owing to its efficiency and simplicity. However, it lacks essential security features, relying on SSL/TLS at a lower layer. The associated high CPU usage, memory consumption, and noticeable delays make the support for SSL/TLS prohibitively expensive. This research presents a comprehensive payload encryption method utilizing the XoR-HMAC lightweight approach. It is explicitly designed to bolster the security of MQTT communication, with a focus on applications in the healthcare sector. Notably, the proposed approach eliminates the need for intermediate brokers to support SSL/TLS or manage certificates. XoR-HMAC brings both symmetric encryption and authentication to data. Results from our evaluation highlight the advantages of our approach, showcasing reduced setup time, encryption/decryption time, mean jitter, mean delay, CPU usage, and memory consumption compared to both SSL/TLS and Fernet approaches.