A Protocol-Aware P4 Pipeline for MQTT Security and Anomaly Mitigation in Edge IoT Systems

Abstract

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.