IoT-ID: Robust IoT Device Identification Based on Feature Drift Adaptation

Internet of Things (IoT) devices deployed in publicly accessible locations increasingly encounter security threats from device replacement and impersonation attacks. Unfortunately, the limited memory and poor computing capability on such devices make solutions involving complex algorithms or enhanced authentication protocols untenable. To address this issue, device identification technologies based on traffic characteristics finger-printing have been proposed to prevent illegal device intrusion and impersonation. However, because of time-dependent distribution of traffic characteristics, these approaches often become less accurate over time. Meanwhile insufficient attention has been paid to the impact of possible changes on the accuracy of device identification. Therefore, we propose a novel feature selection method based on degree of feature drift and genetic algorithm to keep high accuracy and stability of device identification. The degree of feature drift— relevance of features through time and gain ratio are combined as a composite metric to filter out stable features. Furthermore, in order to perform equally well in device identification, we use the genetic algorithm to select the most discriminate feature subset. Experiments show that the accuracy of device recognition compared with other methods is increased from 86.4% to 94.5%, and the robustness of recognition is also improved.