Privacy issues

In smart farming several sensor-​based technologies are adopted over cloud through smart applications. The data provided by the sensors have to be healthy and should be protected. So, the privacy issues must be considered for a faithful work environment.

1. Data security: IoT sensors and devices collect enormous potential and dynamic data. Data leakage must be prevented to unauthorized persons.Example: Use of anti-​jamming agriculture devices bypasses some several economic losses to the farmers. Smart farming includes artificial intelligence and “5G” communication that requires quick response from the users. So, the data are stored in the cloud. Privacy features must be provided to avoid data theft by third parties. A technology invention includes multi-​disciplinary efforts in hardware and software. All the policies must be made against the occurrence of cyber-attacks (Society, 2016).
2. Authorization: Smart farming includes devices (sensors) and autonomous vehicles (tractors, drones, etc.) that communicate with each other either through machine to machine or through cloud using message queue telemetry transport (http://mqtt.org), and some other protocols like constrained application protocols (http://coap.technology/) and IoT communication protocols. In agriculture, livestock (cattle) is a big source of income for farmers. In many cases, sensors are embedded in livestock for monitoring their health condition so that medicine can be injected remotely without doctor’s intervention (Berckmans, 2006; Rosell-​Polo et al., 2015). While purchasing/selling the cattle if the sensors are not removed, important livestock data can be easily accessed. The equipment firmware must be updated over the air from authorized person(s) only. Multi-​cloud and cross-​cloud model must be used for firm updating and data transfer (Tang and Sandhu, 2013; Pustchi et al., 2015). Proper authorization must be given to the farmer for making the right decisions for smart farming.
3. Secure communication: the most important aspect in privacy issues is providing secure communication through authentication of IoT devices. The public key infrastructure authentication mechanism is not a convenient solution for IoT devices because the IoT devices usually have less memory (storage), low power consumption and limited processing capability. Somewhat realistic solutions for smart farming would be secure and lightweight multi-​factor protocols (Law et al., 2013; Wazid et al., 2018). Authentication of connecting device is done by the intermediary certifying authority (Fan et al., 2020). For smart farming, the number of attempts made over lightweight cryptography is limited (Henriques and Vernekar, 2017).
4. Regulations: Smart farming raises different legal issues due to involvement of different stakeholders and bodies. So, different parties must come to an agreement and understand the license polices (Boghossian, 2018; Jahn, 2019). The farmers who invest in smart infrastructure fear data theft. In fact, the livestock and agriculture are merely regulated firms. Over the world various rules, regulations and authorities over selling and producing goods are there. Such amenability can be regulated by monitoring production cycle.