Nowadays, devices are connected across all areas, from intelligent buildings and smart cities to Industry 4.0 andsmart healthcare. With the exponential growth of Internet of Things usage in our world, IoT security is still thebiggest challenge for its deployment. The main goal of IoT security is to ensure the accessibility of services providedby an IoT environment, protect privacy, and confidentiality, and guarantee the safety of IoT users, infrastructures,data, and devices. Authentication, as the first line of defense against security threats, becomes the priority ofeveryone. It can either grant or deny users access to resources according to their legitimacy. As a result, studyingand researching authentication issues within IoT is extremely important. As a result, studying and researchingauthentication issues within IoT is extremely important. This article presents a comparative study of recent researchin IoT security;it provides an analysis of recent authentication protocols from2019 to 2023 that cover several areaswithin IoT (such as smart cities, healthcare, and industry). This survey sought to provide an IoT security researchsummary, the biggest susceptibilities, and attacks, the appropriate technologies, and the most used simulators. Itillustrates that the resistance of protocols against attacks, and their computational and communication cost arelinked directly to the cryptography technique used to build it. Furthermore, it discusses the gaps in recent schemesand provides some future research directions.