A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Lightweight Authentication and Key Exchange Algorithm for Smart Agriculture Monitoring System

Agriculture plays a vital role in the economic life cycle of an agrarian country and considers the backbone of the economy. It supplies not just raw food materials, but also a vast number of job opportunities. Therefore, modern technology is required in agriculture to increase productivity. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) could be used to monitor climatic parameters in an agriculture field, such as the acidity level of soil, soil moisture, humidity, light, and so on. Climate variables have a significant impact on crop growth, quality, and productivity. These factors contribute to increased agricultural productivity in terms of both quantity and quality. WSN, on the other hand, has security risks such as impersonation, alteration, interference, and interception all of which have negative effects on crop production and other agricultural activities. The primary issues for agricultural WSN are hence privacy preservation and security enhancement. In this paper, we proposed a privacy-preserving and efficient key agreement framework for smart agriculture monitoring systems by using elliptic curve cryptography and hash function. The proposed framework is secure against various security assaults and provides secure communication in smart agriculture monitoring systems. We demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed protocol for mutual authentication and key exchange using BAN logic, and we also simulate the security correctness of the encrypted proposed framework using the well-known security verification Scyther tool. Using the ROR model, we formalize the security of the proposed system. Further, we provide a comparison based on security features, computation, and communication overheads comparison between the proposed protocol and similar protocols in the same context. Hence, when compared to other similar protocols in the same environment, the proposed protocol provides superior security and efficiency than other existing protocols. For the practical implementation of smart agriculture monitoring systems, the proposed protocol is better than comparable protocols.