Towards trustworthy IoT networks: A systematic review of non-repudiation mechanisms

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become integral to modern society, yet ensuring secure, trustworthy, and accountable communication remains a critical challenge. Non-repudiation is a foundational security service that provides verifiable evidence of origin, receipt, integrity, and action, making it essential for trust establishment, auditability, dispute resolution, and forensic analysis in IoT environments. However, existing reviews have primarily focused on broader IoT security requirements, such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, privacy, and access control, with limited systematic attention given to non-repudiation mechanisms. This paper presents a systematic literature review of non-repudiation mechanisms in IoT-based systems published between 2015 and 2026. Following PRISMA guidelines and applying rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, we identified 41 relevant studies. The reviewed schemes are classified into three main categories: digital signature-based schemes, blockchain-based schemes, and hybrid schemes. Digital signature-based schemes are further divided into classical signature-based mechanisms, including PKI-based, identity-based, certificateless/certificateless aggregate, and signcryption-based schemes, and post-quantum signature-based schemes. Blockchain-based schemes rely on ledger immutability, distributed consensus, and smart-contract execution to preserve tamper-evident evidence, while hybrid schemes combine digital signatures with blockchain-based evidence preservation, including blockchain with classical signature schemes and blockchain with post-quantum signature schemes. The review analyses application domains, security properties, performance evaluation practices, and key trade-offs, including scalability, resource constraints, communication and storage overhead, latency, gas cost, and centralised trust dependencies. The findings show a growing shift from standalone signer-binding mechanisms towards hybrid, auditable, and quantum-resilient evidence-preservation architectures. Future research should prioritise lightweight, formally verified, privacy-preserving, and post-quantum-resilient non-repudiation mechanisms tailored to the resource constraints, trust assumptions, and domain-specific requirements of modern IoT ecosystems.