Security on the Farm: Safely Communicating with Legacy Agricultural Instrumentation

The notion of IoT has taken the farm by storm. Irrigation is controlled to the resolution of individual plants, fertilizer is dispensed based on yields from previous growing cycles, and livestock feed, water, and environment are all monitored and under automatic control. Much of the equipment that performs this monitoring and control, however, predates the Internet of Things, and integrating this legacy equipment into modern communication systems is fraught with issues, particularly security issues. We describe our approach to providing secure, ubiquitous connectivity to a variety of previously isolated systems on the farm, enabling these systems to safely become part of the IoT.