SAWPS: Secure Access Control for Wearable Plant Sensors—Reinforcing Agriculture 4.0

The deployment of Agriculture 4.0 depends heavily on the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensors for increasing productivity and reducing costs of cultivation. Wearable plant sensors (WPSs), an IoT variant, can greatly optimize agricultural yields, sense early indications of disease, reduce waste, and minimize environmental concerns. Nonetheless, the induction of WPS into the plant fields always remains precarious for its open nature. We can witness many authentication protocols for agriculture setting, yet inefficient or insecure due to their vulnerability to known attacks. Most of these protocols lack privacy and perfect forward secrecy (PFS)-based significant features and are not suited for agricultural fields due to the utilization of complex crypto-primitives. Thus, to realize Agriculture 4.0 objectives, novel security solutions based on ultralight crypto-primitives are required. We propose an authentication protocol (SAWPS) for WPSs using Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) that is not only lightweight but also ensures privacy and PFS features. Moreoever, SAWPS is resistant to known attacks, including denial of service (DoS), ephemeral secret leakage, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, and forgery threats. The theoretical evaluation along with formal analysis based on real-or-random (RoR) model is provided for correctness and security. The performance results demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness of SAWPS over the comparative studies.