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Wireless sensors networks (WSNs) are characterized by flexibility and scalability in any environment. These networks are increasingly used in agricultural and industrial environments and have a dual role in data collection from sensors and transmission to a monitoring system, as well as enabling the management of the monitored environment. Environment management depends on trust in the data collected from the surrounding environment, including the time of data creation. This paper proposes a trust model for monitoring humidity and moisture in agricultural and industrial environments. The proposed model uses a digital signature and public key infrastructure (PKI) to establish trust in the data source, i.e., the trust in the sensor. Trust in data generation is essential for real-time environmental monitoring and subsequent analyzes, thus timestamp technology is implemented here to further ensure that gathered data are not created or changed after the assigned time. Model validation is performed using the Castalia network simulator by testing energy consumption at the receiver and sender nodes and the delay incurred by creating or validating a trust token. In addition, validation is also performed using the Ascertia TSA Crusher application for the time consumed to obtain a timestamp from the free TSA. The results show that by applying different digital signs and timestamps, the trust entity of the WSN improved significantly with an increase in power consumption of the sender node by up to 9.3% and receiver node by up to 126.3% for a higher number of nodes, along with a packet delay of up to 15.6% and an average total time consumed up to 1.186 s to obtain the timestamp from the best chosen TSA, which was as expected.

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used in agriculture monitoring to improve the quality and productivity of farming. In this application, sensors gather different types of data (i.e., humidity, carbon dioxide level, and temperature) in real-time scenarios. Thus, data gathering, transmission, and rapid response to new circumstances require a secured data mechanism to avoid malicious adversaries. Therefore, this paper focuses on data security from the data origin source to the end-user, and proposes a general data security model that is independent of the network topology and structure, and can be widely used in the agriculture monitoring application. The developed model considers practical aspects, the architecture of the sensor node, as well as the necessity to save energy while ensuring data security, and optimize the model through the application of organizational and technical measures. The model evaluation is conducted through simulation in terms of energy consumption. The result shows that the proposed model ensures good data security at the cost of a slight increase in energy consumption at receiver and sender nodes, and energy consumption per bit, up to 2%, 7%, and 1.3%, respectively, due to overhead added for authentication in the network.