Inferring Hidden IoT Devices and User Interactions via Spatial-Temporal Traffic Fingerprinting

Abstract

With the popularization of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart home and industry fields, a huge number of IoT devices are connected to the Internet. However, what devices are connected to a network may not be known by the Internet Service Provider (ISP), since many IoT devices are placed within small networks (e.g., home networks) and are hidden behind network address translation (NAT). Without pinpointing IoT devices in a network, it is unlikely for the ISP to appropriately configure security policies and effectively manage the network. Additionally, inferring fine-grained user interactions of IoT devices is also an interesting yet unresolved problem. In this paper, we design an efficient and scalable system via spatial-temporal traffic fingerprinting from an ISP’s perspective in consideration of practical issues like learning-testing asymmetry. Our system can accurately identify typical IoT devices in a network, with the additional capability of identifying what devices are hidden behind NAT and the number of each type of device that share the same IP address. Our system can also detect user interactions and meanwhile identify their (concurrent) number through a multi-output regression model. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that the system can generally identify IoT devices with an F1-Score above 0.999, and estimate the number of the same type of IoT device behind NAT with an average error below 5%. By studying 29 user interactions of 7 devices, we show that our system is promising in detecting user interactions.