The proliferation of heterogeneous Internet of things (IoT) devices connected to the Internet produces several operational and security challenges, such as monitoring, detecting, and recognizing millions of interconnected IoT devices. Network and system administrators must correctly identify which devices are functional, need security updates, or are vulnerable to specific attacks. IoT profiling is an emerging technique to identify and validate the connected devices’ specific behaviour and isolate the suspected and vulnerable devices within the network for further monitoring. This article provides a comprehensive review of various IoT device profiling methods and provides a clear taxonomy for IoT profiling techniques based on different security perspectives. We first investigate several current IoT device profiling techniques and their applications. Next, we analyzed various IoT device vulnerabilities, outlined multiple features, and provided detailed information to implement profiling algorithms’ risk assessment/mitigation stage. By reviewing approaches for profiling IoT devices, we identify various state-of-the-art methods that organizations of different domains can implement to satisfy profiling needs. Furthermore, this article also discusses several machine learning and deep learning algorithms utilized for IoT device profiling. Finally, we discuss challenges and future research possibilities in this domain.

A Survey on IoT Profiling, Fingerprinting, and Identification

With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, security risks have also arisen. The preidentification of IoT devices connected to the network can help administrators to set corresponding security policies according to the functionality and heterogeneity of the devices. However, the existing methods are based on manually extracted features and prior knowledge to identify the IoT devices, which increases the difficulty of the device identification task and reduces the timeliness. In this paper, we present CBBI, a novel IoT device identification approach. On the one hand, CBBI uses a hybrid neural network model Conv-BiLSTM to automatically learn the representative spatial and temporal features from the network traffic, such as the position relationship of the internal organization structure in network communication traffic, the time sequence of the data packets, and the duration of the network flow. On the other hand, CBBI contains the data augmentation module FGAN that solves the problem of data imbalance in deep learning and improves the accuracy of the model. Finally, we used the public dataset and laboratory dataset to evaluate CBBI from multiple dimensions. The evaluation results for different datasets show that our approach achieves the accurate identification of IoT devices.

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Identifying IoT Devices Based on Spatial and Temporal Features from Network Traffic

Sharing data securely and efficiently has been identified as an issue in IoT-based smart systems such as smart cities, smart agriculture, smart health, etc. A large number of IoT devices are used in these smart systems and they produce a large amount of data. IoT devices generally have limited storage and processing capabilities, and configuring any security techniques on these devices is a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel device identity management approach for blockchain-based IoT systems that provides data security in two ways. Firstly, a lightweight time-based identification protocol that uses hub identification for validating data. Secondly, data storage is augmented with an effective blockchain application for providing easy access and immutability for data sharing among multiple parties. Our initial prototype implementation shows that: our identity management approach can be implemented in large scale settings, our system can be effectively implemented in blockchain platforms, and our performance evaluation result shows that the prototype fulfills system requirements adequately.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/19/7535/pdf?version=1665623576

A Blockchain Based Secure IoT System Using Device Identity Management

Smart home IoT devices lack proper security, raising safety and privacy concerns. One-size-fits-all network administration is ineffective because of the diverse QoS requirements of IoT devices. Device classification can improve IoT administration and security. It identifies vulnerable and rogue items and automates network administration by device type or function. Considering this, a promising research topic focusing on Machine Learning (ML)-based traffic analysis has emerged in order to demystify hidden patterns in IoT traffic and enable automatic device classification. This study analyzes these approaches to understand their potential and limitations. It starts by describing a generic workflow for IoT device classification. It then looks at the methods and solutions for each stage of the workflow. This mainly consists of i) an analysis of IoT traffic data acquisition methodologies and scenarios, as well as a classification of public datasets, ii) a literature evaluation of IoT traffic feature extraction, categorizing and comparing popular features, as well as describing open-source feature extraction tools, and iii) a comparison of ML approaches for IoT device classification and how they have been evaluated. The findings of the analysis are presented in taxonomies with statistics showing literature trends. This study also explores and suggests undiscovered or understudied research directions. 

A Survey of Smart Home IoT Device Classification Using Machine Learning-Based Network Traffic Analysis

With the large-scale application of the Internet of Things (IoT), security issues have become increasingly prominent. Device identification is an effective way to secure IoT environment by quickly identifying the category or model of devices in the network. Currently, the passive fingerprinting method used for IoT device identification based on network traffic flow mostly focuses on protocol features in packet headers but does not consider the direction and length of packet sequences. This paper proposes a device identification method for the IoT based on directional packet length sequences in network flows and a deep convolutional neural network. Each value in a packet length sequence represents the size and transmission direction of the corresponding packet. This method constructs device fingerprints from packet length sequences and uses convolutional layers to extract deep features from the device fingerprints. Experimental results show that this method can effectively recognize device identity with accuracy, recall, precision, and f1-score over 99%. Compared with methods using traditional machine learning and feature extraction techniques, our feature representation is more intuitive, and the classification model is effective.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/21/8337/pdf?version=1667886108

IoT Device Identification Using Directional Packet Length Sequences and 1D-CNN

The past decades have seen the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) in various domains. Identifying the IoT devices connected to the network is a crucial aspect of network security. However, existing work on identifying IoT devices based on manually extracted features and prior knowledge, leading to low efficiency and identification accuracy. In this paper, we propose an automatic end-to-end IoT device identification method (IoT ETEI) based on CNN+BiLSTM deep learning model, which outperforms traditional methods from the perspective of overhead and identify accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed method by deploying IoT ETEI in the face of identifying IoT devices on public datasets with the accuracy rate over 99 %, even for IoT devices that use encryption protocols.

Jiahao Dai

Papers

IoT ETEI: End-to-End IoT Device Identification Method

Identifying IoT Devices Based on Spatial and Temporal Features from Network Traffic