Internet of Things Authentication Protocols: Comparative Study

Nowadays, devices are connected across all areas, from intelligent buildings and smart cities to Industry 4.0 and smart healthcare. With the exponential growth of Internet of Things usage in our world, IoT security is still the biggest challenge for its deployment. The main goal of IoT security is to ensure the accessibility of services provided by an IoT environment, protect privacy, and confidentiality, and guarantee the safety of IoT users, infrastructures, data, and devices. Authentication, as the first line of defense against security threats, becomes the priority of everyone. It can either grant or deny users access to resources according to their legitimacy. As a result, studying and researching authentication issues within IoT is extremely important. As a result, studying and researching authentication issues within IoT is extremely important. This article presents a comparative study of recent research in IoT security; it provides an analysis of recent authentication protocols from 2019 to 2023 that cover several areas within IoT (such as smart cities, healthcare, and industry). This survey sought to provide an IoT security research summary, the biggest susceptibilities, and attacks, the appropriate technologies, and the most used simulators. It illustrates that the resistance of protocols against attacks, and their computational and communication cost are linked directly to the cryptography technique used to build it. Furthermore, it discusses the gaps in recent schemes and provides some future research directions.