SHA-AES based on Chaining Block Code and Galois Counter Mode Encryptions for the Privacy of Smart Farming Systems

In smart farming, IoT plays a dominant role in diverse data generation, data transmission, and applications such as irrigation estimation, soil and environmental monitoring, food supply chain and field monitoring. The current architecture of IoT is mainly centralized and single-point controlled; thereby opening up privacy and security lapses. Several approaches have favoured advanced data encryption to preserve privacy during transmission or storage. The debilitating challenges of IoT systems sparingly reported in previous works include: security of physical/logical components; software/hardware interoperability; high energy requirements; low processing/storage capacity, and network architecture/scalability. This paper comparatively studied encryption modes of Chaining Block Code (CBC) and Galois Counter Mode (GCM) based on hybrid algorithm of SHA1-256 and AES246 (known as SHA-AES scheme) towards preserving privacy of IoT data. The outcomes revealed that, the SHA-AES scheme based on CBC was better in terms of speed - encryption (8.34%) and decryption (43.42%); storage consumption - secret key sizes (50.00%) and ciphertext sizes (26.88%) against GCM. This implies that, the GCM approach offers the highest privacy protection but, less effective due to sluggish speed and high memory utilization. Also, strong cryptographic schemes interleaved with CBC and GCM hardening schemes offered improved confusion state, diffusion state, complexity, and performances. Future works could consider modifying the complex processes of GCM approach by minimizing key generation time to support resource-constrained devices.