Elliptic Curve Cryptography-Based Scheme for Secure Signaling and Data Exchanges in Precision Agriculture

Precision agriculture encompasses automation and application of a wide range of information technology devices to improve farm output. In this environment, smart devices collect and exchange a massive number of messages with other devices and servers over public channels. Consequently, smart farming is exposed to diverse attacks, which can have serious consequences since the sensed data are normally processed to help determine the agricultural field status and facilitate decision-making. Although a myriad of security schemes has been presented in the literature to curb these challenges, they either have poor performance or are susceptible to attacks. In this paper, an elliptic curve cryptography-based scheme is presented, which is shown to be formally secure under the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic. In addition, it is semantically demonstrated to offer user privacy, anonymity, unlinkability, untraceability, robust authentication, session key agreement, and key secrecy and does not require the deployment of verifier tables. In addition, it can withstand side-channeling, physical capture, eavesdropping, password guessing, spoofing, forgery, replay, session hijacking, impersonation, de-synchronization, man-in-the-middle, privileged insider, denial of service, stolen smart device, and known session-specific temporary information attacks. In terms of performance, the proposed protocol results in 14.67% and 18% reductions in computation and communication costs, respectively, and a 35.29% improvement in supported security features.