Abstract—Smart agriculture is one of the most important applications of Internet of Things (IoT) technology. However, IoT devices are used outdoors, which increases their vulnerability to cyberattacks. To secure data collected and exchanged in IoT-based smart agriculture, this paper provides a new enhanced mutual authentication protocol based on the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). The proposed protocol uses a one-way hash function and random numbers to support basic security features. Moreover, to secure the user’s data against brute-force attacks and password guessing, we used the Honey Encryption algorithm. Formal and informal security analyses of our scheme highlight its performance and prove that the proposed scheme resists well-known attacks, such as the denning-ssaco attack, smart card loss, Gateway (GWN) bypassing, and Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack. Further, our scheme comparison with the state-of-the-art schemes shows that it requires acceptable computation and communication costs, less than 5 ms, regarding its advantages over existing authentication schemes and the security level it ensures.
 
Keywords—Internet of Things (IoT), smart agriculture, security, mutual authentication, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)


Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).