MQTT Broker Hardening & IoT DoS Lab

Deployed an MQTT broker on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Raspberry Pi OS Lite, then ran my own denial-of-service attacks against it to study where IoT messaging protocols fail without hardening.

• Set up MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), the dominant lightweight messaging protocol behind most IoT deployments, in a controlled lab environment.
• Simulated the class of attacks behind real-world IoT botnets like Mirai, then applied hardening measures (authentication, rate limiting, TLS) and re-tested.
• Turned hands-on offensive testing into concrete, defensible hardening recommendations for constrained IoT devices.

Full write-up: MQTT Broker Hardening on Raspberry Pi