# Survey on Security Threats in Agricultural IoT and Smart Farming
## 2 State-of-the-Art ICT in Agriculture: Definitions, Technologies, Applications and Benefits  
Over the last years, the role of ICT and IoT in agriculture is increasingly important [3]. ICT and IoT consists the backbone of the fourth industrial revolution [10], contributing into sustainable growth and development, especially in the agricultural sector of developing countries [11]. The demand for greatly increased productivity and efficiency, at a global level, in conjunction with the need to decrease costs and increase the occupation time, from the employers' point of view, render these technologies an attractive choice for farmers and companies in the agricultural domain. The integration of IoT into agriculture has resulted in a number of notable applications [12], such as the analysis of crop productivity, crop health monitoring, soil nutrition management, rainfall monitoring, water management and pest infestation monitoring [3]. Systems and IoT applications, such as decision support tools, automated irrigation, frost protection, remote monitoring and fertilization systems, are some typical examples of IoT-based tools that can be deployed and used in the agricultural sector [12; 13]. This new form of agriculture which engages ICT and IoT technologies is often denoted as Precision Farming (PF) or Precision Agriculture (PA). Precision Farming or Precision Agriculture, according to [PERSON] and [PERSON], is a technological innovation which takes full advantage of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and digitalization of agriculture measurements so as to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of crop production in terms of fertilizer, pest and water management [14]. From this early definition of PA in 1997, the technology evolved rapidly together with the concept of PA itself. Nowadays, Precision Agriculture can be applied and presented also as satellite farming or site-specific crop management (SSCM). PA or SSCM is a farming management concept based on gathering measurements, analyzing and responding to inter- and intra-field variability in crops or livestock [15]. The goal of PA-related research is to design a decision support system (DSS) for the entire farm management, capable to maximize the outcomes by minimizing the inputs and preserving resources [16; 17; 18]. PA engages a plethora of IoT and electronic sensors for monitoring and controlling the production. Furthermore, until a few years ago, the agricultural domain was typically considered as a heavily mechanized, offline industrial sector. The PA concept came to change that, as there is an increasing trend to move agriculture online. More and more crop and livestock farms interconnect their systems, making them remotely accessible, so that they can easily be monitored and controlled [19]. As already highlighted, PA adopts digital technologies to achieve its purposes [20]. According to the European Commission, object identification, georeferencing, measurement of physical and chemical parameters, satellite navigation, connectivity, data storage and analysis, process automation and vehicle driving are currently the most adopted technologies of PA [20; 21]. Thanks to IoT, farmers can get access to collected data in real time and without human intervention. Due to the evolution of technology, the size and shape of sensors is getting smaller and more sophisticated, while in parallel the general cost of the IoT devices is getting lower. The combination of daily-life tools, such as smart phones and/or laptops, with IoT technologies (spanning sensors, gateways, network and middleware devices, as well as additional components for various purposes, e.g., low altitude air-borne hyperspectral imaging system) [22] lead the innovation in the agricultural sector and establish a new domain of interest, often referred to as \"Smart Farming\". The ambition of the aforementioned innovations is to confront the industry problems that have occurred over recent decades since the first agriculture revolution in 1970 [3; 11].