AbstractUser authentication is a promising security solution in which an external user having his/her mobile device can securely access the real‐time information directly from the deployed smart devices in an Internet of Things‐enabled intelligent precision agricultural environment. To achieve this goal, we present a new signature‐based three factor user authentication scheme. The established session key between a user and the accessed smart device is then used to make secure communication among them to fetch the real‐time data of the device. A detailed security analysis including the random‐oracle based formal security, formal security verification using the broadly recognized automated validation of internet security protocols and applications tool and nonmathematical informal security analysis show the robustness of the proposed scheme against a number of potential attacks. In addition, testbed experiments are performed for measuring computational time of various cryptographic primitives that are used for comparative study among the proposed scheme and other related existing competing schemes. The detailed comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme has a better trade‐off among its offered security and functionality features, and communication and computational overheads as compared with those for other competing schemes.