Public MQTT Brokers and Reserved Topics – Discussion Post

Preface This is a discussion post and these are currently my thoughts on this topic. I would be grateful for comments and feedback. Introduction MQTT is still in the early stages of deployment and currently is used only on private networks. However with the growth in the adoption of the MQTT protocol for information distribution the number of public brokers and topics will probably increase substantially just as happened with websites in the early days of the internet.

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Understanding MQTT Topics

MQTT topics are a form of addressing that allows MQTT clients to share information. MQTT Topics are structured in a hierarchy similar to folders and files in a file system using the forward slash ( / )as a delimiter. Using this system you can create a user friendly and self descriptive naming structures of you own choosing. Topic names are: Case sensitive use UTF-8 strings. Must consist of at least one character to be valid.

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Mosquitto ACL -Configuring and Testing MQTT Topic Restrictions

Not only can you restrict access to the Mosquitto MQTT broker using a username and password you can also restrict access to topics using an ACL (Access control list). Unless you are running an open broker you will want to restrict access to topics so that only authorized users/clients can publish or subscribe to them.

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