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. The agricultural industry has a major contribution to the economy due to its huge share in the gross domestic product (GDP) and as a source of employment. India is currently one of the world’s largest producers of agricultural products due to its bio-diversity. 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). The growth of IoT and Blockchain technology as two rapidly emerging fields can ameliorate the state of the food chain today. The application of such advancements is highly based on an exchange of messages between various devices in the farming milieu and raises several scenarios which require cryptographic security. In this thesis, we understand the concept of precision agriculture, its evolution into smart agriculture, and the benefits of such evolution. The applications of IoT in agriculture, which give rise to various developing areas in agriculture, are studied. We study the security scenarios applicable in husbandry through the analysis of possible attacks and threats. The use and evolution of blockchain in the agriculture sector are studied. A layered architecture for smart farming is proposed that is independent of the underlying technologies, and the requirements of cryptographic security have been laid out based on the proposed architecture. A novel generalized blockchain-based security architecture has also been proposed. The testbeds available for IoT-based agricultural systems have been studied in detail. A literature survey of security protocols for various security subsectors in smart agriculture and authentication protocols in various smart applications provides a detailed dissection of the progress in each of the farming security sub-areas. We also perform a rigorous literature review to inspect the state-of-the-art information security using blockchain technology. The current progress in developing IoT-based tools and systems in the industry has also been studied. 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. The 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. The proposed scheme relies on one-way hashing and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). For user biometric verification, the fuzzy extractor technique has been applied because it is verified using the Hamming distance to avoid false acceptance and rejection errors. A detailed security analysis, including the random-oracle-based formal security, formal security verification using the broadly-recognized Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool, and non-mathematical informal security analysis show the robustness of the proposed scheme against a number of potential attacks. In addition, testbed experiments are performed to measure the computational time of various cryptographic primitives used for comparative study among the proposed scheme and other competing schemes. The detailed comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme has a better trade-off between its offered security and functionality features and communication and computational overheads compared to other competing schemes. In 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. Several IoT smart devices and drones can be deployed in an IPA to monitor an agricultural environment. The drones can be further utilized to collect the data from smart devices and send it to the Ground Station Server (GSS). However, insecure communication among the smart devices, drones, and the GSS make the IoT agriculture environment vulnerable to various potential attacks. The blocks formed with the encrypted transactions and their respective signatures by the GSS are mined by the cloud servers to verify and add the blocks to the private blockchain center. Detailed security analysis and comparative study reveal that the proposed AKMS-AgriIoT supports better security and provides more functionality features, fewer communication costs, and comparable computation costs compared to other relevant schemes. In addition, a blockchain-based implementation of the proposed AKMS-AgriIoT has also been carried out. The third contribution of this research work involves designing a new smart contractbased blockchain-envisioned authenticated key agreement mechanism SCBAS-SF in a smart farming environment. The device-to-device (D2D) authentication phase and device-togateway (D2G) authentication phase support mutual authentication and key agreement between two IoT-enabled devices and between an IoT device and the gateway node in the network, respectively. The edge servers create the blocks on the authenticated sensor data of IoT devices received from the gateway nodes and then sent to the cloud server. The blocks added to the blockchain are a mixture of encrypted and unencrypted sensor data depending on whether it should be available openly to all stakeholders or privately to one particular stakeholder. The blockchain is used to secure sensitive sensor data after authenti- cation is completed. The smart contract-based consensus mechanism allows verification and addition of the formed blocks by a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) cloud server network. The security of the proposed scheme SCBAS-SF is done through formal and informal security analysis and the formal security verification tool AVISPA. A detailed comparative study reveals that the proposed scheme offers superior security and more functionality features than existing competing authentication protocols. A blockchain-based simulation has also been conducted to measure computational time for a varied number of mined blocks and a varied number of transactions per block. Real-time testbed has been implemented to securely send a captured farm image from an IoT smart device to the cloud server via the gateway node and edge server using the proposed SCBAS-SF protocol. The fourth contribution of this thesis proposes an efficient blockchain-enabled authenticated key agreement scheme for mobile vehicles-assisted precision agricultural IoT networks, called AgroMobiBlock. The limited existing work on authentication in agricultural networks shows passive usage of blockchains with very high costs. In AgroMobiBlock, we propose a novel idea using the elliptic curve operations on an active hybrid blockchain over mobile farming vehicles with low computation and communication costs. The formal and informal security analysis along with the formal security verification using the AVISPA software tool have shown the robustness of AgroMobiBlock against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, replay, physical capture, and ephemeral secret leakage attacks among other potential attacks. The blockchain-based simulation on large-scale nodes shows the computational time for an increase in the network and block sizes. Moreover, the real-time testbed experiments have been performed to show the practical usefulness of the proposed AgroMobiBlock. Keywords: Intelligent Precision Agriculture (IPA), smart agriculture, smart farming, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, Blockchain of Things (BCoT), authentication, key agreement, security, testbed experiments.