Big Data Analytics-Envisioned Authenticated Key Management Scheme in IoT-Based Smart Farming System for Sustainable Development of Smart Cities

Smart farming enhances sustainable communication practices through the deployment of energy-efficient Internet of Things (IoT) devices, low-power wireless technologies, and edge/fog computing to reduce data transmission and energy usage. Smart cities represent a concept in which technology, data, and innovation enhance urban efficiency, sustainability, and livability. Smart farming has the potential to facilitate the sustainable development of smart cities. However, integrating smart farming into smart city systems presents significant challenges, particularly with respect to the security of their interconnected components. The vulnerability of agricultural information and the likelihood of cybersecurity threats necessitate the development of targeted security solutions for smart farming. To address these challenges, we propose a Big Data Analytics-envisioned secure smart farming scheme for sustainable cities (in short, CSSF-SC). It is an efficient authenticated key agreement mechanism that enables secure mutual authentication, session-key establishment, and dynamic key management among smart farming devices, drones, and cloud servers. Using the Scyther verification tool, security is formally verified under the Dolev–Yao and CK adversary models, demonstrating resilience to various potential attacks. A comparative performance analysis shows that CSSF-SC outperforms current schemes in terms of computation and communication costs while offering stronger security and additional functionalities. Finally, a practical implementation is done using the MangoLeafBD dataset and an EfficientNet-B7 architecture. It achieves 99.16% accuracy, validating the framework’s effectiveness for secure crop-data collection and analysis in real-world scenarios.