"Collaborative Project Seeks to Protect Agricultural Technology From Cyberattacks"

A team of researchers at the University of Nebraska is working on a critical issue in agriculture and automated systems, which is cybersecurity for agricultural machinery and technology. Santosh Pitla, associate professor of advanced machinery systems at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), gathered team members from Nebraska U and the University of Nebraska at Omaha campuses in fall 2020 for a project aimed at examining the security and hackability of autonomous farm vehicles. Pitla is working with Mark Freyhof, a master's student in agricultural engineering at Nebraska; George Grispos, an assistant professor of cybersecurity at UNO; and Cody Stolle, a research assistant professor at Nebraska. Freyhof conducted a case study of cybersecurity breaches on agricultural equipment, using Flex-Ro as a test case. The Flex-Ro agricultural robot can be operated autonomously and under remote control. To avoid potentially damaging tests on the Flex-Ro machine, Freyhof decided to build a testbed to investigate specific systems on the robot. The "Security Test Bed for Agricultural Vehicles and Environments" (STAVE) testbed was a useful tool for investigating Flex-Ro cybersecurity vulnerabilities. According to Pitla, it has great potential for future research into agricultural machinery cybersecurity. The group published a research paper on the various applications of STAVE. This article continues to discuss the collaborative research project aimed at exploring the cybersecurity of agricultural machinery and technology. 

UNL reports "Collaborative Project Seeks to Protect Agricultural Technology From Cyberattacks"