Security challenges to smart agriculture: Current state, key issues, and future directions

Smart agriculture integrates a set of technologies, devices, protocols, and computational paradigms to improve agricultural processes. Big data, artificial intelligence, cloud, and edge computing provide capabilities and solutions to keep, store, and analyze the massive data generated by components. However, smart agriculture is still emerging and has a low level of security features. Future solutions will demand data availability and accuracy as key points to help farmers, and security is crucial to building robust and efficient systems. Since smart agriculture comprises a wide variety and quantity of resources, security addresses issues such as compatibility, constrained resources, and massive data. Conventional protection schemes used in the traditional Internet or Internet of Things may not be useful for agricultural systems, creating extra demands and opportunities. This paper aims at reviewing the state-of-the art of smart agriculture security, particularly in open-field agriculture, discussing its architecture, describing security issues, presenting the major challenges and future directions.