can you recommend a free mqtt broker ?

[nikki81]

I am looking to be able to access my sensors from outside my home network what is the best free mqtt broker to use ?

thank nikki

[LisaM]

You do realize that they are all insecure?
Tampering with your HA will be a breeze...

[nikki81]

Thanks I wasn't aware that they were insecure. Is there a secure way of connecting with them?

Thanks nikki

[LisaM]

Since it's plain text put on a lightweight message broker, it will be hard to secure it. You could use tls/ssl to encrypt the transport to the broker, but that will still leave the possibility to send fake messages from the broker to the HA server...
Complete security can only be archieved by encrypting the message itself by the sensor and decrypt it by the HA server, which will be hard to do.

[grovkillen]

Why not use a private broker hosted in your LAN? Mosquitto is a great one and you can add login credentials etc. The install might not be user friendly but once you have it up and running its pretty much flawless. Some images for RPi is available with it already installed, I haven't used that myself but you could try.

[LisaM]

Why not use a private broker hosted in your LAN? Mosquitto is a great one and you can add login credentials etc. The install might not be user friendly but once you have it up and running its pretty much flawless. Some images for RPi is available with it already installed, I haven't used that myself but you could try.

For that you need:
- A hole in your firewall, preferable port 8883 (MQTT-SSL)
- MQTT SSL setup
- MQTT authentication setup (at least for outside ip adresses)

[nikki81]

Just been thinking is it possible to use google home or alexa servers ?

[nikki81]

what protocol do nest and hive thermostats use ? are these platforms secure ?

[nikki81]

is it possible to use IFTTT ? (https://ifttt.com)

[Martinus]

I am looking to be able to access my sensors from outside my home network what is the best free mqtt broker to use ?

thank nikki

Run your privately deployed broker and use a VPN client on your smartphone...

[nikki81]

Thanks I didn't think of that. I'll give it a try !

[bobbybeans]

my suggestion, forget all of what they said for setting up certs and all that crap
setup a VPN, it can either be site to site which can be on your routers or pi
or you just vpn on your phone. this is what I do, like the first guy said it is all insecure and we all rely on the weakest programmer of the project to not create bugs. which happen all the time. I would not trust any application to be open outside of my network. VPN much more secure and super simple to setup on a pi

use this site http://www.pivpn.io/ . it will set it up for you and its super SUPER simple to do. Then you can vpn in and do anything you want inside your network

[LuisBerner]

I've heard of only real estate brokers hahaha

[Justblair]

I use an openhab server, it's quite capable of talking to my mqtt devices. I then can use it's own (relatively secure) online system without me having to expose open sockets to the outside web.