Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in the Smart Farming Systems: Types, Applications and Cyber-Security Threats

Agriculture is the most important provider of a nation's survival and plays a vital role in economic growth. Smart farming (Agriculture 4.0) enhances traditional farming practices by introducing on-field smart and intelligent devices. Agriculture 4.0 can be referred to as the Digital agricultural revolution since it combines divergent technologies, devices, computing paradigms and protocols. IoT - Drones based Smart Farming environment helps in monitoring crop and field, better crop management, improving crop quality, increasing crop quantity, lowering fertilizer usage, efficient irrigation, etc. In IoT devices like sensor systems, drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and machines that are controlled remotely the security features are deployed as built-in procedures or as software tools. In the context of data which were collected from the perception layer devices and transmitted to the back-end server agents, protocol-based security is applied. However, security issues are seen as critical challenges in a smart farming environment since the deployed devices and processing data were victimized to cyber-attacks. This paper aims an insight analysis in state-of-the-art drones based smart farming, several types of drones with its application areas, outlining cyber-security threats for smart farming environment and providing important security challenges and future perspectives.