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)

Summary

In this chapter, we generated a private certificate authority, a server certificate, and client certificates to enable TLS transport security and TLS client authentication with Mosquitto. Communications between MQTT clients and the MQTT server are encrypted.

We worked with OpenSSL to generate self-signed digital certificates for our development environment. We tested the MQTT TLS configuration with MQTT.fx, MQTT-spy, and Mosquitto command-line utilities. We forced Mosquitto to use only a specific TLS version.

There are many other security topics related to MQTT servers and Mosquitto. We will work with some of them in forthcoming chapters, in which we will develop applications that will use MQTT with Python.

Now that we understand how to encrypt communications between MQTT clients and the Mosquitto server, we will understand MQTT libraries and we will write Python code...