A Survey on Smart Agriculture: Development Modes, Technologies, and Security and Privacy Challenges

TLDR

Smart agriculture, driven by the integration of modern IT and traditional farming, offers intelligent automation but raises significant information security concerns, especially as many studies overlook agricultural equipment as potential threats. The paper aims to outline three main smart agriculture development modes and propose future technologies for advancing the field. The authors identify seven key technologies and eleven applications, summarize six security and privacy countermeasures, and analyze challenges across production and IT domains. Experiments with solar insecticidal lamp IoT devices show that agricultural equipment can compromise security.

Abstract

With the deep combination of both modern information technology and traditional agriculture, the era of agriculture 4.0, which takes the form of smart agriculture, has come. Smart agriculture provides solutions for agricultural intelligence and automation. However, information security issues cannot be ignored with the development of agriculture brought by modern information technology. In this paper, three typical development modes of smart agriculture (precision agriculture, facility agriculture, and order agriculture) are presented. Then, 7 key technologies and 11 key applications are derived from the above modes. Based on the above technologies and applications, 6 security and privacy countermeasures (authentication and access control, privacy-preserving, blockchain-based solutions for data integrity, cryptography and key management, physical countermeasures, and intrusion detection systems) are summarized and discussed. Moreover, the security challenges of smart agriculture are analyzed and organized into two aspects: 1) agricultural production, and 2) information technology. Most current research projects have not taken agricultural equipment as potential security threats. Therefore, we did some additional experiments based on solar insecticidal lamps Internet of Things, and the results indicate that agricultural equipment has an impact on agricultural security. Finally, more technologies (5 G communication, fog computing, Internet of Everything, renewable energy management system, software defined network, virtual reality, augmented reality, and cyber security datasets for smart agriculture) are described as the future research directions of smart agriculture.