A PUF-based Approach for Sustainable Cybersecurity in Smart Agriculture

The simplicity, low cost, and scalability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices have led researchers to study their applications in a wide range of areas such as Healthcare, Transportation, and Agriculture. IoT devices help farmers to monitor the conditions in a field. These are connected to edge devices for real-time analysis. The edge servers send commands to actuators in the farm directly, without human intervention. At the same time, security vulnerabilities are a big concern, concomitant with the increasing utilization of IoT devices. If the duplication of an IoT device occurs and attackers gain access to the system, then the integrity of the entire ecosystem will be at stake, regardless of the application domain. This paper presents a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) based hardware security primitive for the authentication of Internet of Agro-Things (IoAT) devices. The proposed security scheme has been prototyped with a testbed evaluation. An arbiter PUF module has been used for the validation of the proposed scheme. The PUF based security primitive is lightweight, scalable, and robust as it mainly depends on inherent manufacturing variations, thereby ensuring no chance for the duplication of IoT devices.