Threat Modeling and Attack Surface Analysis of IoT-Enabled Controlled Environment Agriculture Systems
For the food and agriculture critical infrastructure sector, this work provides the first formal threat model and quantifies security deficiencies, highlighting urgent need for cybersecurity baselines.
This paper presents the first comprehensive threat model for IoT-enabled Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) systems, identifying 123 unique threats and five novel attack classes specific to AI-driven CEA. The analysis reveals severe security gaps: 10 of 15 communication protocols lack authentication or encryption, and a survey of 10 vendors found only one CVE, zero bug bounties, and zero IEC 62443 certifications.
The United States designates Food and Agriculture as one of sixteen critical infrastructure sectors, yet no mandatory cybersecurity requirements exist for agricultural operations and no formal threat model has been published for Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) systems. This paper presents the first comprehensive threat model for IoT-enabled CEA, applying STRIDE analysis, MITRE ATT&CK for ICS mapping, and IEC 62443 zone-and-conduit decomposition to a production platform deployed across 30+ commercial facilities in 8 U.S. climate zones. We enumerate 123 unique threats across 25 data-flow-diagram elements spanning 15 communication protocols, 10 of which operate with zero authentication or encryption by design. We identify five novel attack classes unique to AI-driven CEA: stealth destabilization of neural-network-tuned PID controllers, baseline drift poisoning of anomaly detectors, cross-facility propagation via federated transfer learning, adversarial agronomic schedules that exploit crop biology rather than computational models, and reward poisoning of reinforcement-learning energy optimizers. Physical impact analysis quantifies crop loss timelines from minutes (aeroponics) to days, including worker safety hazards from CO2 injection manipulation. A survey of 10 commercial CEA vendors reveals only one CVE ever issued, zero bug bounty programs, and zero IEC 62443 certifications. We propose a defense-in-depth countermeasure framework and recommend Security Level 2 as a minimum baseline.