An Algorithm for IoT Device Identification
Johann Bauer · 2020
Years ago, hackers recognised the potential of IoT devices for attacks. In 2016, comprehensive DDoS attacks based on such devices made headlines. Their number has been growing rapidly for several years. It is expected that 50 billion IoT devices will be used by 2020 [1]. As a result, the damage potential continues to grow. This makes it even more important that each individual protects their IoT devices. It is essential that users know whether the devices they use are vulnerable. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm that can be used to identify IoT devices in the local network. Both active and passive identification methods are considered. The resulting observations are combined to a fingerprint and compared with the behaviour of unknown devices. Since these observations may differ slightly, we use a modified form of the Jaccard index to compare the observation sets. We then use the resulting implementation in an experiment to check the suitability of the algorithm. The results show that a high proportion of the expected observations are recognised and that the delimitation is made with a high degree of certainty. Thus we imply that our algorithm can be generally used to identify IoT devices.