The agriculture sector is increasingly adopting innovative technologies to meet the growing food demands of the global population. To optimize resource utilization and minimize crop losses, farmers are joining cooperatives to share their data and resources among member farms. However, while farmers benefit from this data sharing and interconnection, it exposes them to cybersecurity threats and privacy concerns. A cyberattack on one farm can have widespread consequences, affecting the targeted farm as well as all member farms within a cooperative. For instance, a de-authentication attack prevents sensors from connecting to the network, obstructing the farming application from receiving real-time data. This disruption obstructs decision-making for all member farms that rely on this data from an attacked farm. Further, farmers have adopted digital twin (DT) technology that facilitates a virtual farm replica that encompasses vital aspects of farming, such as crop cultivation, soil composition and weather conditions. However, it’s critical to acknowledge that attackers can target these digital twins (DTs), potentially disrupting real physical farm operations.In this research, we address existing gaps by proposing a novel and secure architecture for Cooperative Smart Farming (CSF). First, we highlight the role of edge-based DTs in enhancing the efficiency and resilience of agricultural operations. To validate this, we develop a test environment for CSF, implementing various cyberattacks on both the DTs and their physical counterparts using different attack vectors. We collect two smart farming network datasets to identify potential threats. After identifying these threats, we focus on preventing the transmission of malicious data from compromised farms to the central cloud server. To achieve this, we propose a CNN-Transformer-based network anomaly detection model, specifically designed for deployment at the edge. As a proof of concept, we implement this model and evaluate its performance by varying the number of encoder layers. Additionally, we apply Post-Quantization to compress the model and demonstrate the impact of compression on its performance in edge environments. Finally, we compare the model’s performance with traditional machine learning approaches to assess its overall effectiveness.

The agriculture industry is extensive utilizing AI and data-driven systems for efficiency and automation, with the goal to meet the rising food demand. Individual farm owners can leverage agricultural cooperatives to consolidate resources, exchange data, and share domain knowledge. These cooperatives can enable the generation of AI-supported insights for their member farmers. However, this collaborative approach has raised concerns among individual smart farm owners regarding cybersecurity threats, and privacy. A cybersecurity breach not only endangers the farm attacked but can also risks the entire network of smart farms members within the cooperative. In this research, we emphasize security challenges within cooperative smart farming and introduce a multi-layered architecture incorporating Digital Twins (DT). Further, we introduce a hierarchical federated transfer learning framework designed to address and mitigate the security threats in collaborative smart farming. Our approach leverages Federated Learning (FL) based Anomaly Detection (AD), which operate on edge servers, enabling the execution of AD models locally without exposing the farm’s data. This localization also has excellent generalization ability, which can highly improve the detection of unknown cyber attacks. We employ a hierarchical FL structure that supports aggregation at various levels, fostering multi-party collaboration. Furthermore, we have devised an approach that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models, complemented by transfer learning. The objective is to expedite training duration while upholding high accuracy levels. To illustrate the efficiency of our proposed architecture, we present a use case to demonstrate our model’s capabilities. Furthermore, we also present a proof-of-concept implementation of our proposed architecture within Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, reflecting real-world feasibility.