Book Image

Hands-On MQTT Programming with Python

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Hands-On MQTT Programming with Python

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

<p>MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol for small sensors and mobile devices. This book explores the features of the latest versions of MQTT for IoT and M2M communications, how to use them with Python 3, and allow you to interact with sensors and actuators using Python.</p> <p>The book begins with the specific vocabulary of MQTT and its working modes, followed by installing a Mosquitto MQTT broker. You will use different utilities and diagrams to understand the most important concepts related to MQTT. You will learn to make all the necessary configuration to work with digital certificates for encrypting all data sent between the MQTT clients and the server. You will also work with the different Quality of Service levels and later analyze and compare their overheads.</p> <p>You will write Python 3.x code to control a vehicle with MQTT messages delivered through encrypted connections (TLS 1.2), and learn how leverage your knowledge of the MQTT protocol to build a solution based on requirements. Towards the end, you will write Python code to use the PubNub cloud-based real-time MQTT provider to monitor a surfing competition.</p> <p>In the end, you will have a solution that was built from scratch by analyzing the requirements and then write Python code that will run on water-proof IoT boards connected to multiple sensors in surfboards.</p>
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Creating a certificate for each MQTT client

Now, we want to require each MQTT client to provide a valid certificate to establish a connection with the MQTT server. This way, only clients that have a valid certificate will be able to publish or subscribe to topics. We will use the previously created private certificate authority to create client certificates for authentication.

We will generate a sample certificate for our local computer that will act as a client. We can follow the same procedure to generate additional certificates for additional devices that we want to connect to the Mosquitto server. We just need to use a different name for the file and use a different device name in the corresponding option.

We must use the same certificate authority certificate that we used to generate the server certificate to generate the client certificates. As previously explained, for...