A trusted IoT data sharing and secure oracle based access for agricultural production risk management

Abstract

Agricultural risks associated with weather events, soil conditions, diseases, and pests have risen in recent years due to climate change. These risks have burdened farmers with the shock of financial stress and endangered the region’s food security. Despite increasing risks, notable risk management tools like agricultural insurance have not effectively reached marginal farmers in developing economies. This can be attributed to the fact that existing centralized agricultural information systems lack trust factors in sharing and accessing agricultural risk data, which is accompanied by processing delays in insurance payouts. To this end, the emergence of promising technologies like blockchain helps establish trust and automates insurance-based payments with smart contracts. This work proposes a framework called AgriSSIOracle with two key contributions. The first is to have a trusted agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) data sharing that employs blockchain-based Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and provable credentials. Second is the decentralized oracle-based access control mechanism for smart contracts in agricultural insurance. A method for privacy-preserved authentication and data provenance for agricultural IoT devices is developed with SSI-based Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs). Next, the IoT data sharing scheme is illustrated using publish–subscribe and request–response communication patterns based on the device data credentials. Finally, the decentralized oracle mechanism for smart contracts is built based on multiparty computation for risk-related data access. The implementation of the framework is realized using a permissioned identity blockchain called Hyperledger Indy and Ethereum, which is a public blockchain for smart contracts. The security and privacy analysis confirms that the AgriSSIOracle framework ensures trust factors, particularly authenticity, privacy, data provenance, data integrity, and access control. The framework is evaluated with respect to the transaction throughput, latency, credential issue-verify-revoke time, and resource utilization metrics. The evaluation results prove that the AgriSSIOracle solution is scalable and efficient and meets the requirements of real-time deployment.