Security in IoT-enabled smart agriculture: architecture, security solutions and challenges

Abstract

Agricultural industry is one of the most vital industries that has a major contribution to the economy due to its share in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and as a source of employment. The past few decades have seen immense change in the operation of agricultural sector with the introduction of precision farming in conjunction with Internet of Things (IoT). The application of such advancements is highly based on exchange of messages between various devices in the farming. This paper aims to study the security scenarios applicable in husbandry through the analysis of possible attacks and threats. The testbeds available for agriculture based on IoT have been studied. An architecture for smart farming is proposed which is independent of the underlying technologies that may be used and the requirements of security have been laid out based on the proposed architecture. A literature survey of security protocols for various subsectors of security in smart agriculture along with authentication protocols in smart applications provides a detailed direction of the progress in each of farming security sub-areas and identifies the dearth of existing protocols. The current progress in development of IoT-based tools and systems from industry has also been studied.