Search for: All records

Rapid advances in the Internet‐of‐Things (IoT) domain have led to the development of several useful and interesting devices that have enhanced the quality of home living and industrial automation. The vulnerabilities in the IoT devices have rendered them susceptible to compromise and forgery. The problem of device authentication, that is, the question of whether a device's identity is what it claims to be, is still an open problem. Device fingerprinting seems to be a promising authentication mechanism. Device fingerprinting profiles a device based on information available about the device and generate a robust, verifiable and unique identity for the device. Existing approaches for device fingerprinting may not be feasible or cost‐effective for the IoT domain due to the resource constraints and heterogeneity of the IoT devices. Due to resource and cost constraints, behavioral fingerprinting provides promising directions for fingerprinting IoT devices. Behavioral fingerprinting allows security researchers to understand the behavioral profile of a device and to establish some guidelines regarding the device operations. In this article, we discuss existing approaches for behavioral fingerprinting of devices in general and evaluate their applicability for IoT devices. Furthermore, we discuss potential approaches for fingerprinting IoT devices and give an overview of some of the preliminary attempts to fingerprint IoT devices. We conclude by highlighting the future research directions for fingerprinting in the IoT domain.

This article is categorized under:

Application Areas > Science and Technology

Application Areas > Internet

Technologies > Machine Learning

Application Areas > Industry Specific Applications

 

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has brought in new challenges in device identification --what the device is, and authentication --is the device the one it claims to be. Traditionally, the authentication problem is solved by means of a cryptographic protocol. However, the computational complexity of cryptographic protocols and/or problems related to key management, render almost all cryptography based authentication protocols impractical for IoT. The problem of device identification is, on the other hand, sadly neglected. Almost always an artificially created identity is softly associated with the device. We believe that device fingerprinting can be used to solve both these problems effectively. In this work, we present a methodology to perform IoT device behavioral fingerprinting that can be employed to undertake strong device identification. A device behavior is approximated using features extracted from the network traffic of the device. These features are used to train a machine learning model that can be used to detect similar device-types. We validate our approach using five-fold cross validation; we report a identification rate of 93-100 and a mean accuracy of 99%, across all our experiments. Furthermore, we show preliminary results for fingerprinting device categories, i.e., identifying different devices having similar functionality.