The Internet of Insecure Cows - A Security Analysis of Wireless Smart Devices Used for Dairy Farming

IoT devices are becoming increasingly common in the world of agriculture with farmers now relying on technology to keep their businesses running. From crop management and greenhouse automation to entirely autonomous milking parlours, technology is being used in more ways than ever to improve efficiency. The benefits are huge, with the ability for farms to expand due to lower requirements for manual labour and other resources like water usage, so much so that in places it would now be infeasible for farmers to go back to traditional ways of working. Unfortunately, this technological advancement also brings with it an increase in the risk of cyber attacks. If one of these succeeds it could cause catastrophic effects for both individual farms and the security of the wider food supply chain.

This project provides a comprehensive analysis of the security of collars used for health monitoring of cows in a smart dairy farm. This is the first practical cyber security analysis of such devices that are currently in use on farms. We have successfully reverse-engineered the wireless protocol and demonstrated the ability to inject false data into the system, posing as one of the sensors. Testing has shown that both the system to receive signals from the sensors and the data endpoint software are vulnerable to data injection. This paper highlights the specific threats from the vulnerabilities and identifies potential countermeasures that could be integrated into the sensors in the future.