Maintaining IoT Device Identification under Concept Drift via Budget-Aware Traffic Labeling

Identification of IoT device types from passive traffic is increasingly used for security management in enterprise and ISP networks. However, the performance of machine learning-based classifiers gradually degrades under concept drift as device behavior evolves. Therefore, maintaining classification performance requires periodic retraining with newly labeled deployment traffic. The operational challenge is determining how much and which deployment traffic instances to label for maintaining classification performance. We show that these two decisions should be treated separately. While retraining solely on instances selected by a drift detector is prone to systematically overlooking parts of the emerging behavioral space, uniformly sampled deployment traffic captures more representative behavioral changes. Instead, drift detection is more effective at determining the amount of deployment traffic that should be labeled. We make three contributions. (1) We conduct a two-year longitudinal study of IoT traffic and characterize how behavioral evolution manifests across device classes and how retraining with newly labeled traffic restores classification performance. (2) We develop a conformity-based drift detector that captures class-conditional behavioral models directly from raw traffic features and provides feature-level explanations of behavioral evolution. (3) We demonstrate that adjusting the traffic labeling rate according to the observed behavioral evolution, combined with uniform traffic sampling, maintains classifier performance more effectively than detector-guided sample selection and is beneficial to managing the traffic labeling effort. We further show that this strategy performs comparably to confidence-guided adaptation while providing feature-level explanations. Our evaluation uses 3.8 million IPFIX flow records collected from 21 IoT types over more than 2 years.

From Flows to Functions: Macroscopic Behavioral Fingerprinting of IoT Devices via Network Services

Identifying devices such as cameras, printers, voice assistants, or health monitoring sensors, collectively known as the Internet of Things (IoT), within a network is a critical operational task, particularly to manage the cyber risks they introduce. While behavioral fingerprinting based on network traffic analysis has shown promise, most existing approaches rely on machine learning (ML) techniques applied to fine-grained features of short-lived traffic units (packets and/or flows). These methods tend to be computationally expensive, sensitive to traffic measurement errors, and often produce opaque inferences. In this paper, we propose a macroscopic, lightweight, and explainable alternative to behavioral fingerprinting focusing on the network services (e.g., TCP/80, UDP/53) that IoT devices use to perform their intended functions over extended periods. Our contributions are threefold. (1) We demonstrate that IoT devices exhibit stable and distinguishable patterns in their use of network services over a period of time. We formalize the notion of service-level fingerprints and derive a generalized method to represent network behaviors using a configurable granularity parameter. (2) We develop a procedure to extract service-level fingerprints, apply it to traffic from 13 consumer IoT device types in a lab testbed, and evaluate the resulting representations in terms of their convergence and recurrence properties. (3) We validate the efficacy of service-level fingerprints for device identification in closed-set and open-set scenarios. Our findings are based on a large dataset comprising about 10 million IPFIX flow records collected over a 1.5-year period.