Effective & Efficient Access Control in Smart Farms: Opportunities, Challenges & Potential Approaches

The Internet of Things technologies has revolutionized the sector of farming and agriculture. It also helped it to face the current environmental and societal challenges. IoT technologies are able to assist the farming sector in many different applications including reducing wasted resources, real time monitoring of crops, monitoring environment conditions, precision agriculture, farm data analytics and improving crops quality, while decreasing the number of workers needed to complete farm related tasks. However, the nature of the Smart farms are diverse in terms of the number, type and location of the installed smart devices, the variety of the collected data, the number and type of workers who help in the farm and have access to farm related data and equipment. At the same time, Farmers are very protective of their own data and sometimes refrain from incorporating smart farming technologies to insure the safety of their data. Therefore, in this paper we outline the security challenges in smart framing settings and explain the need for multi-user, multi- device aware access controls in smart farms. We highlight different possible security scenarios that challenge the adoption of IoT solutions in smart farms and discuss possible solutions.