Unmasking IoT Devices: A Dynamic and Adaptive Classification Approach
Lalith Medury, Luke Robinson, Farah I. Kandah · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
The proliferation of IoT devices has revolutionized automation and connectivity across various industries. These devices rely extensively on wireless communication, enabling flexibility and real-time data exchange. The unique traffic patterns they produce, shaped by protocol usage, communication frequency, and data exchange behaviors allow for accurate device identification based solely on network activity. Previous research on IoT device identification has shown promise but faces key limitations including scalability, requiring frequent retraining for new devices, and are computationally intensive and unsuitable for real-time use. Reliance on spoofable attributes like IP and MAC addresses, or documentation-based profiling, further reduces reliability. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces UMIoT, an adaptive and dynamic Multi-Classifier framework for IoT device identification. UMIoT is trained on packet-streams, assigns a dedicated classifier to each device, improving accuracy, scalability, and adaptability. Furthermore, UMIoT can efficiently detect the presence of new devices without misclassifying their traffic as belonging to existing devices based on a parameterized confidencethreshold metric. Our experimental results demonstrate that UMIoT achieves high identification accuracy, maintains a low prediction time, enables rapid training for new emerging devices in the network, and operates with minimal storage overhead. Additionally, the results highlight the superiority of the proposed framework against existing device identification approaches both in terms of device identification accuracy and performance metrics including prediction time, storage overhead, and new device training time. The framework is also shown to be resilient against adversarial threats including traffic padding, shaping, and MAC address alteration.