Blockchain-Based Cloud-Enabled Security Monitoring Using Internet of Things in Smart Agriculture

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has rapidly progressed in recent years and immensely influenced many industries in how they operate. Consequently, IoT technology has improved productivity in many sectors, and smart farming has also hugely benefited from the IoT. Smart farming enables precision agriculture, high crop yield, and the efficient utilization of natural resources to sustain for a longer time. Smart farming includes sensing capabilities, communication technologies to transmit the collected data from the sensors, and data analytics to extract meaningful information from the collected data. These modules will enable farmers to make intelligent decisions and gain profits. However, incorporating new technologies includes inheriting security and privacy consequences if they are not implemented in a secure manner, and smart farming is not an exception. Therefore, security monitoring is an essential component to be implemented for smart farming. In this paper, we propose a cloud-enabled smart-farm security monitoring framework to monitor device status and sensor anomalies effectively and mitigate security attacks using behavioral patterns. Additionally, a blockchain-based smart-contract application was implemented to securely store security-anomaly information and proactively mitigate similar attacks targeting other farms in the community. We implemented the security-monitoring-framework prototype for smart farms using Arduino Sensor Kit, ESP32, AWS cloud, and the smart contract on the Ethereum Rinkeby Test Network and evaluated network latency to monitor and respond to security events. The performance evaluation of the proposed framework showed that our solution could detect security anomalies within real-time processing time and update the other farm nodes to be aware of the situation.