An Enhanced End-to-End Secure Communication Solution for IoT Smart Medical Devices Based on MQTT Protocol
Wenjie Lan, Hong Rao, Yue Wang, Zhenni Wang, Xiaohan Yang, Shuanggen Liu · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
The MQTT protocol, a protocol based on the pub/sub (publish/subscribe) model, is widely used in the field of IoT. However, it poses certain security risks in areas such as data encryption, identity authentication, and access control. Smart healthcare is an important application domain of the IoT. With the increasing aging population, large amounts of sensitive information require data protection. To address this, we design a framework specifically tailored to ensure end-to-end (E2E) security in IoT communications within smart healthcare, and it does not require ensuring that the broker is in a trusted state; it can operate with a public broker service. This framework incorporates three key management systems, thereby fulfilling the smart healthcare’s requirements for secure and efficient communications and ensuring that data transmission throughout the entire solution is encrypted. Furthermore, in order to ensure that our scheme can be applied in real-life scenarios, we used common IoT hardware devices to validate the proposed framework. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework can satisfy the criteria for E2E communication security.