Lightweight Authentication Protocols for Secure IoT Communication Networks: A Comprehensive Survey, Taxonomy, and Open Challenges

The exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) demands robust yet efficient authentication mechanisms to secure heterogeneous communication networks including resource-constrained devices and multi-tier infrastructures. This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive survey of lightweight authentication protocols in IoT communication networks, supported by a structured systematic literature review methodology. The survey outlines foundational cryptographic primitives and security requirements, and introduces a multi-dimensional taxonomy that maps authentication schemes across cryptographic primitives, authentication types, application domains, security goals, and implementation environments. Building on this taxonomy, the paper reviews cryptography-based, hardware-based, and hybrid authentication approaches, followed by quantitative comparative analysis of computational cost, communication and storage overhead, energy consumption, and formal security validation models. The results show that hash/XOR-based schemes offer very low computation but remain vulnerable to advanced attacks, PUF-based designs provide hardware-rooted trust yet suffer from environmental instability and reconstruction overhead, ECC-based schemes achieve strong security with compact keys but incur non-trivial resource cost, while post-quantum mechanisms enhance quantum resilience but currently impose significant communication and latency burdens for constrained IoT devices. Blockchain-assisted authentication improves decentralised trust at the expense of protocol and infrastructure overhead. Finally, the paper consolidates critical insights and open challenges including scalable key management, lightweight formal security assurance, reliable hardware trust, and post-quantum readiness, providing directions for future secure IoT authentication research.