IoT in Agriculture: Security Challenges and Solutions

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) pertains to employing conventional Internet protocols to facilitate interactions between humans and objects, as well as between objects themselves. Functioning with machines and entities, IoT enables computation, communication, and collaboration among interconnected elements. This integration has extended to various facets of agriculture such as cultivation, surveillance, processing, marketing, and consumer engagement. While recognized security needs for IoT systems have prompted standardization efforts and proposed security mechanisms, persisting challenges and gaps remain due to both unresolved use cases and inadequate security provisions in many deployed IoT devices and systems. This study offers a cybersecurity-oriented overview of IoT-based agriculture, exploring potential applications of IoT devices, classifying agriculture's IoT architecture into four layers, scrutinizing security threats, and proposing effective countermeasures based on IoT architectural layers. An innovative IoT-driven smart agriculture model, fortified by security measures, is also proposed to mitigate cyber threats and enhance agricultural productivity.