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Design and Implementation of a Secure Online Agriculture Marketplace for Farmers and Buyers (Role Based Access and Security)
Subject area: Science,Engineering and Technology · Area of research: Agriculture
Abstract
As agricultural trade in Nigeria increasingly moves onto digital platforms, these systems inherit not only the promise of disintermediating exploitative middlemen but also the cybersecurity exposure that comes with handling the personal data, payments, and multi-role interactions of a large and heterogeneous user base. Prior research has warned that the integration of digital platforms into agriculture introduces new failure modes capable of disrupting food supply chains when security is treated as an afterthought rather than a design principle, yet comparatively few published agricultural marketplace prototypes report concrete security architectures or empirical vulnerability assessments. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the role-based access control (RBAC) and security-by-design subsystem of AgriTrade, a secure online agriculture marketplace connecting verified Nigerian farmers with buyers. Three user roles - Buyer, Farmer, and Administrator - are enforced through a centralized authentication service issuing JSON Web Tokens (JWT), with Bcrypt-hashed password storage, mandatory input validation and escaping to prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), token-based protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), and parameterized data access to prevent SQL Injection. The implemented system was subjected to static source-code analysis to identify latent vulnerabilities and to manual denial-of-service (DoS) testing intended to verify that availability-protection mechanisms remained active under attempted disruption. The evaluation confirmed that role-based restrictions were correctly enforced at every tested boundary, including the specific case of an unverified farmer account being denied product-listing privileges, and that the security controls examined performed as designed under the applied tests. These findings demonstrate that a conventional, layered security-by-design approach, rather than an elaborate or costly bespoke security infrastructure, is sufficient to establish a credible security posture for a multi-role agricultural e-commerce platform operating in a resource-constrained development context
Keywords
Application security, cybersecurity, digital agriculture, role-based access control, security-by-design, vulnerability assessment
References
[1] P. Oruma, K. Eze, and M. Bello, "Farm-level cybersecurity vulnerabilities: Sustainable food security in the digital age," International Journal of Agricultural Innovation, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 52–66, 2021.
[2] S. F. Wamba, R. Queiroz, and C. J. C. Jabbour, "Cybersecurity weaknesses in smart farming programs: Evidence from Nigeria," Journal of Agricultural Informatics and Security, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 33–47, 2024.
[3] O. A. Adedapo, M. O. Adio, Y. M. Saliu, J. Bello, and A. A. Owolabi, "Web application for agricultural produce marketing using modern web technologies," Journal of Information Systems Research, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 65–74, 2024.
[4] T. Adebayo, F. Musa, and O. Kareem, "Farm E-Market: A web-based agricultural commerce system," International Journal of Research and Publication Review, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 223–230, 2024.
[5] M. S. Sadiq, I. P. Singh, M. M. Ahmad, and B. S. Sani, "Digital marketplaces and youth empowerment in agribusiness," International Journal of Agribusiness and Rural Development, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 55–63, 2025.
[6] OWASP Foundation, "OWASP Top 10: 2021 - The ten most critical web application security risks," 2021.
[7] National Institute of Standards and Technology, "Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Role Based Security," NIST Computer Security Resource Center, 2016.
How to cite this paper
@article{1723515,
author = {Zaharadeen Nasiru Adamu, Eru, Akwuma Nathaniel, Ahiaba, Solomon, Kolapo, Ridwan, Prof. Prema Kirubakaran},
title = {Design and Implementation of a Secure Online Agriculture Marketplace for Farmers and Buyers (Role Based Access and Security)},
journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
year = {2026},
volume = {10},
number = {3},
pages = {4153-4162},
issn = {2456-8880},
url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1723515.pdf},
abstract = {As agricultural trade in Nigeria increasingly moves onto digital platforms, these systems inherit not only the promise of disintermediating exploitative middlemen but also the cybersecurity exposure that comes with handling the personal data, payments, and multi-role interactions of a large and heterogeneous user base. Prior research has warned that the integration of digital platforms into agriculture introduces new failure modes capable of disrupting food supply chains when security is treated as an afterthought rather than a design principle, yet comparatively few published agricultural marketplace prototypes report concrete security architectures or empirical vulnerability assessments. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the role-based access control (RBAC) and security-by-design subsystem of AgriTrade, a secure online agriculture marketplace connecting verified Nigerian farmers with buyers. Three user roles - Buyer, Farmer, and Administrator - are enforced through a centralized authentication service issuing JSON Web Tokens (JWT), with Bcrypt-hashed password storage, mandatory input validation and escaping to prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), token-based protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), and parameterized data access to prevent SQL Injection. The implemented system was subjected to static source-code analysis to identify latent vulnerabilities and to manual denial-of-service (DoS) testing intended to verify that availability-protection mechanisms remained active under attempted disruption. The evaluation confirmed that role-based restrictions were correctly enforced at every tested boundary, including the specific case of an unverified farmer account being denied product-listing privileges, and that the security controls examined performed as designed under the applied tests. These findings demonstrate that a conventional, layered security-by-design approach, rather than an elaborate or costly bespoke security infrastructure, is sufficient to establish a credible security posture for a multi-role agricultural e-commerce platform operating in a resource-constrained development context},
keywords = {Application security, cybersecurity, digital agriculture, role-based access control, security-by-design, vulnerability assessment},
month = {September},
}