# A Secure IoT-Based Irrigation System for Precision Agriculture Using the Expeditious Cipher
###### Abstract
As can be noticed, recent research ignores security techniques and concentrates on the usage of machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches, such as fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks (ANNs), and regression models, to optimize IoT-based irrigation systems employing different environmental parameters and weather conditions to schedule the irrigation timing and the quantity of water used for irrigation. However, any alteration in the information coming from sensors and decisions passed to actuators can lead to crop damage, which is considered to be a crucial threat to the national security of any country. As such, a secure channel must be developed between the sensing layer and the decision-making entity to secure information flowing from the sensors to the decision-maker entity and to secure the decision returned to the actuators that control the irrigation system. Because precision agriculture is highly dependent on data and information from the monitored system, any alteration in such data during runtime can lead to expensive unmanageable decisions and actions from farmers. Therefore, there is a need to adopt the security mechanisms required to guarantee basic security functions: authenticity, reliability, integrity, and availability. Moreover, these security mechanisms must be lightweight to meet the requirements of constrained devices used in IoT. \begin{table}
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In [1], the authors reviewed the previous work conducted on smart agriculture and highlights different aspects of applying IoT solutions in smart agriculture. Moreover, the article reviews smart agriculture's related security issues and compares security issues in the industry (urban) and agriculture (rural). In [16], the authors presented a classification of security threats in smart agriculture and precision agriculture environments. The authors classified security threats into six possible attacks: attacks on hardware (side channel attack and radio frequency (RF) jamming), attacks on the network equipment (denial of service (DoS), MITM (man in the middle), botnets, cloud computing attacks), attacks on data (data leakage, ransomware, cloud data leakage, false data injection, misconfiguration), attacks on applications (software update attacks, malware injection, buffer overflow, indirect attacks (SQL injection)), attacks on support chain (third-party attacks, data fabrication), and misuse attacks (cyber-terrorism, invalidation, and compliance). Another classification of security threats is underlined in [17]. The authors classified the security requirements in smart agriculture into six challenges, namely: integrity, availability, authentication, confidentiality, privacy, and Non-repudiation, and highlighted the possible attacks under each challenge. Moreover, a review of existing solutions to IoT security problems is emphasized. In [8], the authors added data freshness, authorization, and self-healing to the security requirements of smart agriculture. In [18], the authors reviewed IoT communication technologies security aspects for smart agriculture. In [19], the authors reviewed all categories of security attacks and the application of WSNs in IoT along with an evaluation of the countermeasures adopted against each type of attack. Moreover, smart irrigation systems developed based on IoT technology consist of constrained nodes in terms of power, memory, and processing resources. As a result, conventional security protocols can not be supported in such systems [20; 21]. Transport layer security (TLS) adds overhead in terms of memory and energy on constrained nodes. As a result of the dependence on constrained nodes in IoT-based irrigation systems, a lightweight security protocol must be deployed. Lightweight cryptography techniques balance throughput against power drain, memory usage, and gate equivalent and have lower performance when compared to cryptography standards (such as AES and SHA-256) [22].