Authentication framework for secure smart farming system deployed for sustainable development of smart cities: a review

Abstract The adoption of smart farming systems in the context of smart cities assumes the use of Internet of Things (IoT) equipment, drones, and cloud computing to facilitate data-driven and sustainable farming and agriculture. Nevertheless, the open, massive, and resource-bound characteristics of such deployments predetermine the essentiality of secure authentication since, in case of breached equipment or unauthorized access, the objective of the food production, resources management, and urban sustainability can be directly disrupted. This study provides a focused analysis of the authentication frameworks proposed for IoT-based smart agricultural systems, specifically examining their relevance to smart city applications. Unlike existing surveys that primarily emphasize architectural descriptions or general discussions on IoT security, this study will systematically examine the efficacy of different authentication methods in agricultural contexts, specifically considering constraints such as limited computational power, communication bandwidth, and energy availability. Authentication schemes are examined in five popular types lightweight cryptographic, blockchain-based, AI/ML-driven, biometric-based, and multi-factor methods and compared according to the well-defined criteria of computation cost, communication overhead, and security functionality. The discussion shows that light cryptographic schemes can be more appropriate to the low-power agricultural devices but the blockchain-based and AI-driven cryptography schemes are more powerful with higher security features, but they introduce higher overhead and are less practical in real-time agricultural applications. The study also identifies key limitations in current research, including the lack of unified evaluation benchmarks, limited formal security validation, and insufficient support for scalability and interoperability across heterogeneous smart farming infrastructures. By highlighting these gaps and trade-offs, this review provides explicit direction for researchers and practitioners in selecting and designing authentication mechanisms that balance security and efficiency in smart farming systems integrated with smart cities.