During an IoT penetration test, you capture plaintext packets on TCP port 1883 flowing between battery-powered sensors and a cloud message broker. The payloads include control fields labeled "PUBLISH" and "SUBSCRIBE," revealing a lightweight publish/subscribe workflow. Which protocol are the devices most likely using, and what primary design objective makes it well-suited for constrained IoT environments?
CoAP - optimized for RESTful request/response exchanges over UDP
XMPP - an XML-based presence protocol that relies on verbose message formatting
MQTT - engineered to minimize network bandwidth usage on constrained devices
AMQP - a feature-rich messaging protocol that introduces significant overhead over TCP
The traffic characteristics match MQTT. MQTT's default transport is TCP port 1883, and its control packets include PUBLISH and SUBSCRIBE operations that implement a publish/subscribe model. The protocol was intentionally designed to keep packet headers extremely small and minimize network bandwidth usage, which is critical for low-bandwidth or high-latency links often found in IoT deployments. While reduced power draw can be a side benefit, the specification explicitly cites minimal bandwidth and device resource requirements as its core objective. CoAP normally runs over UDP port 5683 and follows a REST-like request/response pattern, not publish/subscribe. AMQP is a richer, higher-overhead protocol that operates over TCP, and XMPP relies on verbose XML stanzas, making both less attractive for very constrained devices.
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