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The increasing interconnectivity of the digital age brings new vulnerabilities for cyber criminals and nation state threat actors alike. Every day, threat actors make millions of at-tacks against a variety of systems. Though not all these attacks prove successful, they all share the same goal of manipulating or extracting data from their targets. The dawn of digitalization in the agricultural industry finds itself under the same threats. Because agriculture sits within the category of critical infrastructure, digitizing this industry should be accompanied with special concern for implementing good security practices. At a basic level, good cyber security practice includes ensuring that data remains confidential to users and processes, ensuring that data remains unmodified by unauthorized methods, and ensuring the accessibility of the data. However, no system can be made completely secure. Some form of exploitation will always exist by which proprietary data of the customer, or the manufacturer, can be leaked or abused. Thus, this paper does not ask if vulnerabilities exist on on-board precision farming equipment, but rather it asks what level of risk these exploits possess. In other words, if a vulnerability becomes exploited, what access or data does the attacker gain and does its value equal the amount of effort required to obtain it? The likely answer exposes vulnerabilities that damage the finances or reputations of individual producers and manufactures, which may provide an equal level of danger to the industry if these attacks can be scaled up against multiple targets.

Publication Date

4-2024

Assessing Security Flaws in Modern Precision Farming Systems

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