Security and Privacy Challenges in IoT: A Review of Threats, Solutions, and Future Trends.

Internet of Things (IoT) has become an innovative technology, which links millions of devices in different spheres, such as healthcare, smart cities, industrial automation, and transport. As much as IoT provides an immense difference in terms of efficiency, Automation and data-driven decision-making, these security and privacy threats are diverse. It’s extremely distributed and heterogeneous character, the few resources of a device, and the very high numbers of sensitive data processed by this type of network make IoT systems vulnerable to many threats. The review gives an in-depth examination of the issues of security and privacy related to IoT. The threats are grouped in five broad categories, which are a device-level, network-level, data-related, cloud/backend, and human/social engineering threats. The existing solutions such as lightweight cryptography, authorization methods, intrusion detection tools, system-based security platforms, and threat-detecting systems based on AI are then evaluated in the paper. Moreover, we examine privacy-protective approaches, including data anonymization, differential privacy, federated learning and secure multi-party computing. Besides, the paper raises such emerging trends as Zero Trust Architecture, quantum-safe cryptography, and edge computing security along with key open challenges such as standardization, secure updates, and usability. This review will discuss present research on as well as the industry practices to provide guidance on future research that checks wholesome, scalable, privacypreserving IoT systems.