A Survey of the Security of IoT Network Layers
Mohammed Nasereddin, Erol Gelenbe · 2025
The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized modern life by integrating billions of interconnected devices across diverse domains. However, this widespread connectivity has significantly expanded the cyber attack surface, introducing a multitude of security challenges across all layers of IoT architecture. This survey paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of IoT network security, emphasizing the layered architectural model and the threats associated with each layer. By analyzing the literature as a whole, and identifying a subset of 1137 papers accessible online, we focused our discussion on a pool of 163 peer-reviewed research papers published between 2005 and 2025 primarily across the five major scholarly databases (IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, MDPI, and ACM), which focus on the security of different IoT network layers and address a number of research questions that we have listed in this paper. The papers we discuss in detail examine the attack vectors at each architectural layer, and address state-of-the-art security models, systems, and frameworks developed for attack detection, mitigation, and prevention. A key contribution of this survey is the proposal to integrate a dedicated security layer spanning all IoT layers, complemented by tailored security practices at each layer to establish a useful line of defense. The study highlights the emerging role of IoT forensics as a critical area for future research, and of the need for further research to couple accurate attack detection with real-time mitigation that will enhance the resilience and trustworthiness of next-generation IoT networks.