Characterizing Heterogeneous Internet of Things Devices at Internet Scale Using Semantic Extraction

Abstract

Along with the rapid-growth number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, significant security concerns are raised due to the hidden vulnerabilities among them. Illuminating the characteristics of online devices would shed a light on protecting these potential vulnerable devices. State-of-arts methodologies enumerate devices characteristics as keywords and rules and match them with IoT network data. However, the heterogeneous implementations of IoT devices introduce intricate characteristics features, which impede the large-scale identification. In this work, we close this gap and present a semantic extraction-based approach that can automatically and effectively characterize online devices. We leverage the observation that IoT devices can be identified by analyzing the semantic information of the network packets. Specifically, we first collect the network data of IoT devices and utilize a co-training algorithm to annotate the data. We propose a residual dilate gated convolutional neural network (RDGCNN)-based encoder to extract semantic features from the annotated data. Then, we put forward an entity relationship-based decoder to generate the characteristic triplet (type, brand, and model) of IoT devices by decoding extracted features. We have implemented the prototype of the system and conducted real-world experiments to evaluate the performance. Results show that our approach achieves 92.16% precision and 86.79% recall. In addition, we apply our proposed method to characterize 15 millions IoT devices on the Internet.