Network-Protocol-Based IoT Device Identification

To empower end-users in the management of their IoT devices and related services, a natural solution is to design and implement a digital assistant whose role is to facilitate use of IoT devices, e.g. by recommending available services for the given set of existing IoT devices. This digital assistant must be able to identify the core capabilities of the IoT devices that are connected to home networks. In turn, this requires to identify the nature of the IoT devices connected to these home networks (e.g., category of the device, but also manufacturer and exact model of the device). In this article, we address this issue of IoT device identification. We propose a solution based on several existing network protocols. The key idea of our solution is to analyze the packets sent by the device to extract relevant information for device identification purpose. We show that our solution is effective by uniquely identifying 31 devices among 33 of the tested devices: each of these devices is identified by a unique feature vector using the Bag Of Words representation.