Affiliations: [a] School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China | [b] School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Chengdu, China | [c] Department of Economics, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Jena, Germany | [d] Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Mines and Technology, Tarkwa, Ghana
Abstract: Precision agriculture (PA) involves collecting, processing, and analyzing datasets in agriculture for an informed decision. Due to the high data storage and application maintenance costs, farmers usually outsource their agricultural data obtained from PA to cloud service providers to leverage cloud services. Nonetheless, serious security concerns arise from using cloud services for farmers. For instance, an attacker can intercept agricultural data and run comprehensive statistical analyses to adjudicate farmers’ financial status, extort money, commit identity theft, etc. As a result, compelling data security schemes have become crucial for secure precision farming, where only legitimate users are required to access the agricultural data outsourced to the cloud. This article presents a certificateless signcryption scheme with proxy re-encryption (CLS-PRE) for secure access control in PA. An in-depth security analysis proves that the CLS-PRE scheme is secure in the Random Oracle Model. Detailed performance evaluation also shows that the scheme can reduce the time required to signcrypt and unsigncrypt messages and lower communication overhead.
