SP2F: A secured privacy-preserving framework for smart agricultural Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Abstract The current advancement in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices is revolutionizing conventional farming operations into precision agriculture. The agricultural UAVs combined with IoT use an open channel i.e., the Internet to assist cultivators with data collection, processing, monitoring, and making correct decisions on the farm. However, the use of the Internet opens up a wide range of challenges such as security (e.g., performing cyber-attacks), risk of data privacy (e.g., data poisoning and inference attacks), etc. The usage of current conventional centralized security measures has limitations in terms of a single point of failure, verifiability, traceability, and scalability. Motivated from the aforementioned challenges, we propose a Secured Privacy-Preserving Framework (SP2F) for smart agricultural UAVs. The proposed SP2F framework has two main engines, a two-level privacy engine, and a deep learning-based anomaly detection engine. In the two-level privacy engine, a blockchain, and smart contract-based enhanced Proof of Work (ePoW) is designed for data authentication, and to mitigate data poisoning attacks. A Sparse AutoEncoder (SAE) is applied for transforming data into a new encoded format for preventing inference attacks. In the anomaly detection engine, a Stacked Long-Short-Term Memory (SLSTM) is used to train and evaluate the results of the proposed two-level privacy engine using two publicly accessible IoT-based datasets, namely ToN-IoT and IoT Botnet. Finally, based on thorough analysis, and comparison, we identify that the SP2F framework outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques in both non-blockchain and blockchain frameworks.