Blockchain-Based Lightweight Authentication Protocol for IoT-Enabled Smart Agriculture

Blockchain technology has a significant application in smart farming due to its immutability, decentralization and transparency properties. Data exchanged in an Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart agriculture can be used to remotely monitor the fields and regulate the crop needs for optimal productivity. However, such data is sensitive to several attacks, such as man-in-the-middle attack, replay attack, ephemeral secret leakage attack, impersonation attack and denial of service (DoS) attack. The existing solutions to counter these attacks are either costly or lack significant security features. To mitigate these issues, we design a novel lightweight blockchain based authentication scheme based on a fully decentralized and distributed architecture. The designed scheme is subjected to a rigorous security analysis and also a formal security verification using the widely-used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool, and it is shown that the scheme is robust and secure against various passive and active attacks. A detailed comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme has the low communication cost and significantly lower computation cost while satisfying all the security and functionality features as compared to those for other existing relevant schemes.