Design of Authentication Protocols in IoT enabled Smart Agriculture Environment

Abstract

Agriculture is a vital area for the sustenance of humankind, engulfing manufacturing, security, traceability, and sustainable resource management. With the resources receding expeditiously, it is of utmost significance to innovate techniques that help in the subsistence of agriculture. The past few decades have seen immense change in the operation of the agricultural sector with the introduction of precision farming in conjunction with the Internet of Things (IoT). newlineThe growth of IoT and Blockchain technology as two rapidly emerging fields can ameliorate the state of the food chain today. In this thesis, we understand the concept of precision agriculture, its evolution into smart agriculture, and the benefits of such evolution. A layered architecture fand a novel generalized blockchain-based security architecture has also been proposed. This research work proposes a series of authentication protocols that address the security issues concerning smart farming, including user authentication and mutual authentication between the various involved entities. newlineThe first contribution of this research work presents a new signature-based three-factor user authentication scheme in intelligent precision agriculture. The established session key between a user and the accessed smart device is then used to communicate securely to fetch real-time data from the device. newlineIn the second contribution of this thesis, new authentication and key management scheme for IoT-enabled Intelligent Precision Agriculture (IPA), called AKMS-AgriIoT, has been put forward with the private blockchain-based solution. newlineThe third contribution of this research work involves designing a new smart contract-based blockchain-envisioned authenticated key agreement mechanism SCBAS-SF in a smart farming environment. newlineThe fourth contribution of this thesis proposes an efficient blockchain-enabled authenticated key agreement scheme for mobile vehicles-assisted precision agricultural IoT networks, called AgroM obiBlock newline