Asma Komal

As the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, strong, scalable, and adaptive intrusion detection systems (IDS) become increasingly critical for protecting IoT environments. This paper presents a comprehensive and systematic survey of IDS techniques for IoT environments, covering literature from 2021 to early 2026. The review introduces a multidimensional taxonomy that categorizes IDS approaches by detection strategy, learning paradigm, deployment architecture, and evaluation methodology. We examine conventional techniques, such as signature-based and anomaly-based detection, as well as modern machine-learning and deep-learning approaches. Furthermore, emerging paradigms, including Federated Learning, Explainable AI (XAI), TinyML, Large Language Models (LLMs), Transformer, Quantum Machine Learning, Generative Adversarial Networks and Incremental Learning, are analyzed with respect to their applicability to resource-constrained IoT environments. The paper also provides a detailed analysis of publicly available IDS datasets, validation protocols, and evaluation metrics used for benchmarking detection systems. In addition, critical challenges, including dataset realism, adversarial robustness, scalability, privacy preservation, and ethical considerations, are discussed. Finally, we highlight open research directions and propose guidelines for designing next-generation, trustworthy, and scalable IDS frameworks for IoT networks.