Work

Security Assessment and Secure Architecture Design for an IoT-Based Vertical Hydroponic Farming System

Year: 2026

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: The paper describes the system design and security analysis of an IoT vertical hydroponic farming system, which comprises environmental sensors, an ESP32 controller, wireless communication, and a web-based control and monitoring platform. Most related work evaluates only the functionality of their systems. In this paper, we also evaluate the security aspects of our system, at the wireless, network, and application layers. The assessment involved a penetration testing exercise and structured testing process that included wireless attacks (PMKID, deauthentication), network scanning, and traffic analysis, followed by web application testing. The results of this study showed some issues such as deauthentication attacks, plaintext HTTP communication, public APIs without authentication, and cross-site scripting (XSS) which can be considered as a major security loophole in practical IoT applications for farm use. It makes a primary contribution in the establishment of a multi-level security assessment system. It also identifies attack vectors in the real world and provides recommendations for secure architecture design, encryption, access control, and reliability improvement.

Source: Procedia Computer Science

DOI: 10.1016/j.procs.2026.08.370

Authors: Saken Tleuberdin, Konstantin Malakhov, Daniyar Dauletiya, Yan Kudashov, Tolegen Aidynov, Dina Satybaldina

Institutions: L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Astana IT University

Language: English

Topic: IoT and Edge/Fog Computing

Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Zero hunger, Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan