MUP: Simplifying Secure Over-The-Air Update with MQTT for Constrained IoT Devices.

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is one of the dominating protocols for edge- and cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. When a security vulnerability of an IoT device is known, it has to be fixed as soon as possible. This requires a firmware update procedure. In this paper, we propose a secure update protocol for MQTT-connected devices which ensures the freshness of the firmware, authenticates the new firmware and considers constrained devices. We show that the update protocol is easy to integrate in an MQTT-based IoT network using a semantic approach. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by a detailed performance analysis of our prototype implementation on a IoT device with 32 kB RAM. Thereby, we identify design issues in MQTT 5 which can help to improve the support of constrained devices.

Adaptive distributed replica-exchange simulations.

Owing to the loose coupling between replicas, the replica-exchange (RE) class of algorithms should be able to benefit greatly from using as many resources as available. However, the ability to effectively use multiple distributed resources to reduce the time to completion remains a challenge at many levels. Additionally, an implementation of a pleasingly distributed algorithm such as replica-exchange, which is independent of infrastructural details, does not exist. This paper proposes an extensible and scalable framework based on Simple API for Grid Applications that provides a general-purpose, opportunistic mechanism to effectively use multiple resources in an infrastructure-independent way. By analysing the requirements of the RE algorithm and the challenges of implementing it on real production systems, we propose a new abstraction (BigJob), which forms the basis of the adaptive redistribution and effective scheduling of replicas.