Private blockchain-envisioned drones-assisted authentication scheme in IoT-enabled agricultural environment

Abstract In an Intelligent Precision Agriculture (IPA), several Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices and drones can be deployed to monitor an agricultural environment. The drones can be further utilized to collect the data from smart devices and send to the Ground Station Server ( G S S ) . However, insecure communication among the smart devices, drones and the G S S make the IoT agriculture environment vulnerable to various potential attacks. For this goal, a new authentication and key management scheme for IoT-enabled IPA, called AKMS-AgriIoT, has been put forward with the private blockchain-based solution. The blocks formed with the encrypted transactions and their respective signatures by the G S S are mined by the cloud servers to verify and add the blocks in the private blockchain center. A detailed security analysis and comparative study reveal that the proposed AKMS-AgriIoT supports better security, and provides more functionality features, less communication costs and comparable computation costs as compared to other relevant schemes. In addition, the blockchain-based implementation on the proposed AKMS-AgriIoT has been also carried out.