Enhancing security and privacy in smart agriculture: A novel homomorphic signcryption system

Abstract

Technology driven Smart Agriculture is transforming modern day farming practices through digital tools and real-time data analysis. It monitors plant health in both soil and soilless cultivation, promoting environmentally responsible practices by utilizing integrated sensors and precision methods. Despite the significant potential benefits, challenges persist in ensuring data security in the smart agriculture frameworks. The existing research has explored various mechanisms to cater these issues, yet these solutions susceptible to known attacks i.e., Confidentiality, Authentication, Privacy preservation. Notably, the available schemes in open literature face performance deficiencies due to an overreliance on Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), bilinear pairing, and elliptic curve (EC). To comprehensively address these challenges, this study presents a novel approach via employing homomorphic Signcryption based on Hyper-Elliptic Curves (HEC). Our HEC based Signcryption technique enhances security with lower computational cost and communication overhead as compared to the existing techniques. Furthermore, our solution provides the best performance in terms of efficiency, addressing the privacy preservation issues with conformance to the (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability) CIA triad. For proof of concept and correctness, we have validated the results in Scyther tool, with the assurance that proposed scheme is correct, verified, and resistant against known set of attacks. The proposed scheme achieves a remarkable reduction in both computational and communication costs around 95.08% and 89.28% respectively, enhancing practicality and suitability for real-world implementation. Thus, making it a suitable candidate for employing in smart agriculture environments, encompassing both soil and soilless cultivation scenarios. This research contributes a robust, secure, cost effective, and efficient solution to the challenges posed by the evolving landscape of agriculture, paving the way for enhanced data protection and system resilience in smart agriculture systems.