Beyond the automation gap: A survey of continuous audit for IoT security

Despite decades of research into automated compliance, real-world adoption remains surprisingly low. This implementation gap is particularly significant for auditing Internet of Things (IoT) environments, where the sheer volume of connected devices makes manual security auditing challenging. This adoption gap could cause severe business and governance risks, such as operational disruptions and massive regulatory penalties. By following PRISMA methodology, our review investigates why computer-assisted auditing technologies fail to gain traction in practice. We trace the evolution of compliance automation and reveal a fundamental disconnect: the adoption gap emerges not from technological inadequacy but from interconnected research tensions that neglected the traceability and auditability of the audit itself. Our analysis suggests that closing the adoption gap requires research realignment in a human-centered auditing framework that could be supported by technologies and identifies where each could augment human auditors. Rather than pursuing ever-more sophisticated automation, we argue that effective auditing tools must augment human expertise through responsible human–computer interaction. The review synthesizes diverse approaches across process mining, rule-based matching, machine learning, and language models, consistently finding that technical excellence alone cannot bridge the implementation gap. We conclude by presenting a research roadmap that guides security researchers toward building practically viable solutions that leverage strong technological foundations while addressing the urgent, real-world needs of auditors.