Abstract Context Mutation testing and analysis is concerned with the introduction of single faults (or errors) into a system’s design, specification, implementation or interface and then testing or analysing the effects caused by those faults or errors on the system’s properties and behaviour. Such faulty entities are called mutants. Objective This short paper sketches the idea that mutations can be used to identify whether protocol implementations may deviate from the standards defining those protocols. Methods We apply formal analysis techniques to analyse the harmful effects of mutations on IoT protocol specifications, most importantly, e.g. whether those mutations will violate the IoT protocol standard. Results We discovered in our initial investigation one interesting case where a mutant protocol specification may lead to implementations that drop every message intended for publication to applications without breaking the standard of quality of message delivery in the protocol standard. Conclusion We believe as a result, that there is some additional investigation needed in this direction that could be beneficial in implementing future more reliable protocols and also that the current standards need to be revised to take care of such scenarios.