A SECURE BLOCKCHAIN-ASSISTED IOT FRAMEWORK FOR SMART AGRICULTURE USING QUANTUM-RESISTANT KEY VERIFICATION ALGORITHM (QRKVA)

Abstract

 Smart agriculture is an innovative approach to farming that incorporates IoT devices, blockchain technology, and AI security solutions to allow for real-time monitoring of produces, secure data management, intelligent decision-making, and efficient resource usage. However, with the increasing distribution of data from interconnected devices in agriculture derives significant threats to data privacy, secure communication, unauthorized access, data integrity and cyber threats. To address these challenges, a secure and privacy-preserving blockchain-based system is proposed, in which data collection is enabled by IoT devices on an agricultural farm to achieve enhanced data quality and efficient communication. Moreover, the Hash Based Block Creation Algorithm (HBCA) is used to create the blocks of the blockchain, which includes the agricultural data, time stamp, block ID, and the previous hash value. Following this, the Agricultural information is encrypted using the Blockchain based Advanced Encryption Standard-256 Secure Algorithm (BAES-256SA) which provides highly secured transmission and storage of agricultural information in the blockchain environment. Likewise, a Privacy-Aware Cryptographic Key Generation Algorithm (PA-CKGA) is presented to obtain secure encryption keys to safeguard sensitive data. In addition, Randomized Data Shuffling Algorithm (RDSA) improves security by shuffling the data generated by IoTs before stored in the blockchain or transmitted. Lastly, the Quantum-Resistant Key Verification Algorithm (QRKVA) confirms cryptographic keys, allowing for secure data access and decryption, and resists cyber and quantum computing attacks. The experimental outcomes reveal that the proposed framework is capable of providing secure, privacy-preserving, and reliable smart agriculture data management with the authentication success rate of 95.16%, which shows the effectiveness of the suggested framework.