Performance evaluation of IoT authentication techniques : Balancing security, efficiency, and scalability
Vijaya N. Ahervijaya.aher@vit.eduDepartment of Electronics and Telecommunication EngineeringVishwakarma Institute of TechnologyPune, Maharashtra, 411048, IndiaView full profile → , Manasi Ghamandemanasi.ghamande@vit.eduDepartment of Engineering Science and HumanityVishwakarma Institute of TechnologyPune, Maharashtra, 411048, IndiaView full profile → , Pallavi D. Deshpandepallavi.deshpande@vit.eduDepartment of Electronics and Telecommunication EngineeringVishwakarma Institute of TechnologyPune, Maharashtra, 411048, IndiaView full profile → , Gauri V. Ghulegauri.ghule@vit.eduDepartment of Electronics and Telecommunication EngineeringVishwakarma Institute of TechnologyPune, Maharashtra, 411048, IndiaView full profile → , Ketki Kshirsagarketki.kshirsagar@vit.eduDepartment of Electronics and Telecommunication EngineeringVishwakarma Institute of TechnologyPune, Maharashtra, 411048, IndiaView full profile → , *Rahul S. PolCorresponding authorrahul.pol@vit.eduDepartment of Electronics and Telecommunication EngineeringVishwakarma Institute of TechnologyPune, Maharashtra, 411048, IndiaView full profile →
* Corresponding author · click or hover a name for details
- Received:
- 01 Oct 2025
- Published Online:
- 30 Sep 2026
- Article type:
- Research Article
- Language:
- EN
- Article no.:
- JDMSC-2779
- Pages:
- 3573–3582
Abstract
The uncontrolled growth of Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets have rendered the traditional authentication protocols inadequate, due to the imminent limitation of computer power, latency, and energy usage. The study is a rigorous research on lightweight and blockchain-based authentication schemes by synthesizing the results of thirty-five peer-reviewed articles to evaluate the cryptographic effectiveness in a restricted environment. Strong focus is made on the methods of integrating elliptic curve cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, Merkle hash trees, and consensus algorithms in distributed ledgers. Systematic benchmarking is done in performance metrics like authentication latency, computational overhead, energy consumption, and rate of mitigating attacks. Lightweight schemes have a latency improvement of up to 68 percent and an energy consumption greater than 54 percent, but blockchain-based schemes achieve a 76 percent improvement on trust verifiability and an average resistance to replay attacks of 92 percent. Mutual authentication robustness and scalability in vehicular networks, smart grids and fog based systems are analyzed using a comparative framework. The combination of light-weight computation and decentralization of trust results in a hybridised model that has an ideal throughput and does not compromise confidentiality or anonymity. It is notable that hybrid protocols show less than 2.1% mean packet loss rate in dynamic topology. The paper provides a comprehensive performance based classification of IoT authentication techniques that ends up with an elegant roadmap towards future generation secure communication systems.
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References
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