A machine learning based framework for IoT devices identification using web traffic

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2024 Mar 26:10:e1834. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1834. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Identification of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices has become an essential part of network management to secure the privacy of smart homes and offices. With its wide adoption in the current era, IoT has facilitated the modern age in many ways. However, such proliferation also has associated privacy and data security risks. In the case of smart homes and smart offices, unknown IoT devices increase vulnerabilities and chances of data theft. It is essential to identify the connected devices for secure communication. It is very difficult to maintain the list of rules when the number of connected devices increases and human involvement is necessary to check whether any intruder device has approached the network. Therefore, it is required to automate device identification using machine learning methods. In this article, we propose an accuracy boosting model (ABM) using machine learning models of random forest and extreme gradient boosting. Featuring engineering techniques are employed along with cross-validation to accurately identify IoT devices such as lights, smoke detectors, thermostat, motion sensors, baby monitors, socket, TV, security cameras, and watches. The proposed ensemble model utilizes random forest (RF) and extreme gradient boosting (XGB) as base learners with adaptive boosting. The proposed ensemble model is tested with extensive experiments involving the IoT Device Identification dataset from a public repository. Experimental results indicate a higher accuracy of 91%, precision of 93%, recall of 93%, and F1 score of 93%.

Keywords: Accuracy boosting model; Device identification; Ensemble model; Internet of Things; Machine learning.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2019R1A2C1006159). There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.