Privacy-preserving cloud-connected IoT data using context-aware and end-to-end secure messages

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) enables the development of innovative applications in various domains such as agriculture, smart building, and industry. Integrating the cloud platform’s extensive processing and storage capacity with the ubiquitous sensing and actuation provided by the devices creates an environment that offers vast data. The IoT devices send the data to the cloud platform by IoT applications using mainly publish-subscribe messages, like MQTT, which do not provide standardization to the messages. Moreover, in the cloud-connected IoT, messages with sensitive content require end-to-end security - even when they use Transport Layer Security (TLS). Thus, this article’s main contribution refers to a system that standardizes the publish-subscribe topic and payload with context-aware messages at both ends (device and cloud platform) and provides end-to-end security. Our results demonstrate a Byte efficiency of 40% for the topic and 50% for the end-to-end secure payload compared to the main related works.