Device Identification Method for Internet of Things Based on Spatial-Temporal Feature Residuals

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has penetrated all aspects of our lives through smart cities, health, industries and others that are related to people's livelihood. With the increasing number of IoT devices, more and more personal information is exposed in the network space, which inevitably brings some network security problems. Due to the diversity and heterogeneity of IoT devices, identification of such devices in the complex IoT environments remains a major challenge. Existing deep learning-based device identification methods achieve identification of IoT devices by automatically extracting device traffic features, but usually only single modal features of device traffic are considered, which cannot achieve all-around characterization features of communication traffic and affect the identification results. Therefore, we propose an identification method, termed DMRMTT, that employs a Deep convolutional maxout network and MTT model (Multiple Time-series Transformers) to automatically extract the spatial and temporal features of IoT communication session fingerprints and perform further fusion using the structure of the residual, which makes up for the limitations of the existing methods for studying device traffic. This method can improve the characterization of device traffic behaviour and achieve a more accurate identification of IoT devices. Its efficacy is experimentally validated by using two publicly availbale datasets and compared with existing methods. Results show that our method outperforms other methods in widely used performance metrics and achieves 99.82% identification accuracy, demonstrating its superiority and usefulness in IoT device identification.