Abstract
The agriculture sector has held a major role in human societies across the planet throughout history. The rapid evolution in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) strongly affects the structure and the procedures of modern agriculture. Despite the advantages gained from this evolution, there are several existing as well as emerging security threats that can severely impact the agricultural domain. The present paper provides an overview of the main existing and potential threats for agriculture. Initially, the paper presents an overview of the evolution of ICT solutions and how these may be utilized and affect the agriculture sector. It then conducts an extensive literature review on the use of ICT in agriculture, as well as on the associated emerging threats and vulnerabilities. The authors highlight the main ICT innovations, techniques, benefits, threats and mitigation measures by studying the literature on them and by providing a concise discussion on the possible impacts these could have on the agri-sector.
Highlights
According to the latest research results of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture organization [1], the world will be in need of producing 70% more food in 2050, in comparison with today’s production, in order to feed the constantly growing Earth population, estimated to reach almost 10 billion in2050 [2]
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents an overview of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) applications and benefits in the agricultural domain; Section 3 focuses on the vulnerabilities, risks and threats in Agriculture 4.0; Section 4 focuses on mitigation strategies and techniques concerning the risks presented in the previous section and Section 5 concludes the paper
Crop monitoring, decreasing the overall costs; Logistic and qualitative traceability of food production combining decision making processes with real-time data for reducing the waste of inputs and overall costs; Capitalizing on Big Data resources, at hardware and software level, establishing new agriculture communities in urban and rural areas; Generating novel business models in the sector, creating a new retailer–consumer relationship; Automatic irrigation systems development that adjust their operations based on the humidity, temperature and soil moisture values which are retrieved through the embedded sensors; Collection of environmental parameters, in an automatic way using Internet of Things (IoT), which are usable for further analysis; Big Data analytic processes and tools for enhancing productivity using decision support systems
Summary
According to the latest research results of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture organization [1], the world will be in need of producing 70% more food in 2050, in comparison with today’s production, in order to feed the constantly growing Earth population, estimated to reach almost 10 billion in. The physical threats will always be one of major and unpredictable risks in agriculture but there is an upward trend in the recent decades to attempt to minimize their impact by engaging new technologies To this end, the agricultural domain applications are taking advantage of robust and trustworthy connectivity of different types of equipment, Internet of Things (IoT) networks, and cloud computing infrastructures. The associated term of cyber-security refers to the combination of techniques, skills and processes in order to ensure a high degree of protection for network, computers, programs and data, against malware, attacks, damage and unauthorized access In this context, on a daily basis, new types of cyber threats are emerging, including ransomware, endpoint attacks, phishing, third party attacks, supply chain attacks, artificial intelligence and Machine Learning-driven attacks, crypto-jacking, cyber physical attacks, state sponsored attacks, IoT attacks, threats to smart devices, attacks on connected, semi-autonomous or autonomous, vehicles [8]. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents an overview of ICT applications and benefits in the agricultural domain; Section 3 focuses on the vulnerabilities, risks and threats in Agriculture 4.0; Section 4 focuses on mitigation strategies and techniques concerning the risks presented in the previous section and Section 5 concludes the paper
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