Adaptive Swarm Intelligence-Driven Elliptic Curve Cryptography Optimization for Secure and Lightweight Data Transmission in Agricultural Internet of Things

Abstract

IoT technology has revolutionized smart agriculture by enabling connected sensors to continuously monitor soil, crops, livestock, irrigation, and environmental conditions. However, agricultural IoT networks remain vulnerable to unauthorized access, replay attacks, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, eavesdropping, and data tampering because of resource-constrained devices and insecure wireless channels. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an Adaptive Swarm Intelligence-Driven Elliptic Curve Cryptography Optimization (ASI-ECCO) approach for lightweight and secure data transmission. The key novelty of ASI-ECCO is the proposed Adaptive Security–Resource Coupling (ASRC) mechanism, which dynamically adjusts the optimization priorities of security strength, computational efficiency, energy consumption, and communication overhead according to the current security-risk and residual-energy conditions of agricultural IoT nodes. Unlike conventional ECC optimization approaches using fixed objective weights, ASRC enables context-aware selection of ECC parameters to achieve an adaptive balance between cryptographic protection and resource utilization. Furthermore, an Adaptive Multi-Layer Threat Cognition Network (AMTC-Net) is proposed for adaptive trust evaluation, communication behavior analysis, cryptographic verification, and threat classification. The optimized ECC mechanism supports encryption, authentication, secure key exchange, and data-integrity verification across sensor, gateway, and cloud-server communications. Experimental results demonstrate cryptographic overhead, communication accuracy, communication transparency, energy consumption, threat detection rate, and false positive rate of 18.42%, 95.60%, 95.80%, 5.86 J, 96.34%, and 3.21%, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework for secure and resource-efficient agricultural IoT communication.