A Protocol-Aware P4 Pipeline for MQTT Security and Anomaly Mitigation in Edge IoT Systems
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| author | Binh, Bui Ngoc Thanh Luan, Pham Hoai Duong, Le Vu Trung Hai, Vu Tuan Nakashima, Yasuhiko |
| author_facet | Binh, Bui Ngoc Thanh Luan, Pham Hoai Duong, Le Vu Trung Hai, Vu Tuan Nakashima, Yasuhiko |
| contents | MQTT is the dominant lightweight publish--subscribe protocol for IoT deployments, yet edge security remains inadequate. Cloud-based intrusion detection systems add latency that is unsuitable for real-time control, while CPU-bound firewalls and generic SDN controllers lack MQTT awareness to enforce session validation, topic-based authorization, and behavioral anomaly detection. We propose a P4-based data-plane enforcement scheme for protocol-aware MQTT security and anomaly detection at the network edge. The design combines parser-safe MQTT header extraction with session-order validation, byte-level topic-prefix authorization with per-client rate limiting and soft-cap enforcement, and lightweight anomaly detection based on KeepAlive and Remaining Length screening with clone-to-CPU diagnostics. The scheme leverages stateful primitives in BMv2 (registers, meters, direct counters) to enable runtime policy adaptation with minimal per-packet latency. Experiments on a Mininet/BMv2 testbed demonstrate high policy enforcement accuracy (99.8%, within 95% CI), strong anomaly detection sensitivity (98\% true-positive rate), and high delivery >99.9% for 100--5~kpps; 99.8% at 10~kpps; 99.6\% at 16~kpps) with sub-millisecond per-packet latency. These results show that protocol-aware MQTT filtering can be efficiently realized in the programmable data plane, providing a practical foundation for edge IoT security. Future work will validate the design on production P4 hardware and integrate machine learning--based threshold adaptation. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_07536 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | A Protocol-Aware P4 Pipeline for MQTT Security and Anomaly Mitigation in Edge IoT Systems Binh, Bui Ngoc Thanh Luan, Pham Hoai Duong, Le Vu Trung Hai, Vu Tuan Nakashima, Yasuhiko Cryptography and Security Networking and Internet Architecture MQTT is the dominant lightweight publish--subscribe protocol for IoT deployments, yet edge security remains inadequate. Cloud-based intrusion detection systems add latency that is unsuitable for real-time control, while CPU-bound firewalls and generic SDN controllers lack MQTT awareness to enforce session validation, topic-based authorization, and behavioral anomaly detection. We propose a P4-based data-plane enforcement scheme for protocol-aware MQTT security and anomaly detection at the network edge. The design combines parser-safe MQTT header extraction with session-order validation, byte-level topic-prefix authorization with per-client rate limiting and soft-cap enforcement, and lightweight anomaly detection based on KeepAlive and Remaining Length screening with clone-to-CPU diagnostics. The scheme leverages stateful primitives in BMv2 (registers, meters, direct counters) to enable runtime policy adaptation with minimal per-packet latency. Experiments on a Mininet/BMv2 testbed demonstrate high policy enforcement accuracy (99.8%, within 95% CI), strong anomaly detection sensitivity (98\% true-positive rate), and high delivery >99.9% for 100--5~kpps; 99.8% at 10~kpps; 99.6\% at 16~kpps) with sub-millisecond per-packet latency. These results show that protocol-aware MQTT filtering can be efficiently realized in the programmable data plane, providing a practical foundation for edge IoT security. Future work will validate the design on production P4 hardware and integrate machine learning--based threshold adaptation. |
| title | A Protocol-Aware P4 Pipeline for MQTT Security and Anomaly Mitigation in Edge IoT Systems |
| topic | Cryptography and Security Networking and Internet Architecture |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07536 |