EMQ releases EMQX Enterprise 6.3 with stricter security defaults

EMQ said on Sept. 3, 2026, that it released EMQX Enterprise 6.3.0, a long-term support version for production MQTT deployments in edge, cloud and containerized environments.

The company said the release adds stronger security defaults, an optional hardened security profile, Feature Gates for deployment-specific setup, and updates to observability, performance and stability.

Security is a main focus of the release. EMQ said EMQX Enterprise 6.3 now uses strict MQTT protocol parsing by default and includes stronger credential protection. The company also said the release adds authentication for OpenAPI and Prometheus endpoints, broader detection of problematic connection behavior, context-aware authorization, dynamic authentication routing, enhanced topic metrics, rate limiting and session visibility.

EMQ said the hardened profile is optional in 6.3 and is planned to become the default in EMQX 7.0. It also said organizations can choose a FULL configuration, an ESSENTIAL configuration focused on core MQTT messaging, authentication and authorization, or a custom configuration.

According to the company, Feature Gates validate configuration at startup and resolve dependencies automatically. EMQ said ESSENTIAL mode has an idle boot memory footprint of less than 100 MB and is suited to edge, embedded and containerized environments.

The release also includes operational changes for production use. EMQ said resource-aware defaults now adapt network port and scheduler settings based on assigned CPU resources, the default TCP listener uses Erlang/OTP's modern socket API, JSON encoding and decoding have been improved, and QoS 0 flow control keeps backlogs bounded while QoS 1 and QoS 2 traffic continues.

EMQ said it expanded integrations with Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Kafka via AWS IAM Roles Anywhere and Dynatrace via OpenTelemetry. It also introduced MQTT Agent, which it described as a plugin for stateful, event-driven AI agent workflows.

The company said EMQX Enterprise 6.3 is available immediately. EMQ also said it has more than 1,500 customers worldwide and connects over 500 million devices.

What happens next

EMQ said the hardened security profile will become the default in EMQX 7.0.

Sources

• PR Newswire release from EMQ on EMQX Enterprise 6.3.0

Editorial note: This article was prepared with AI assistance and includes source attribution for reader review.