Lightweight cryptography is a novel diversion from conventional cryptography to minimise its high level of resource requirements, thus it would impeccably fit in the internet-of-things (IoT) environment. The IoT platform is constrained in terms of physical size, internal capacity, other storage allocations like RAM/ROM and data rates. The devices are often battery powered, hence maintenance of the charged energy at least for a few years is essential. However, provision of sufficient security is challenging because the existing cryptographic methods are too heavy to adopt in the IoT. Consequently, an interest arose in the recent past to construct new cryptographic algorithms in a lightweight scale, but the attempts are still struggling to gain robustness against improved IoT threats and hazards.There exists a lack of literature studies to offer overall and up-to-date knowledge on lightweight cryptography. Therefore, this effort is to bridge the areas in the subject by summarising the content we explored during our complete survey recently. This work contains the development of lightweight cryptographic algorithms, its current advancements and futuristic enhancements. In contrast, this covers the history, parametric limitations of the invented methods, research progresses of cryptology as well as cryptanalysis.