IoTScanner: Detecting and Classifying Privacy Threats in IoT Neighborhoods

TL;DR

This paper introduces IoTScanner, a tool that detects and classifies IoT devices and their activities in local wireless environments, enhancing user awareness of privacy threats without prior network knowledge.

Contribution

The paper presents IoTScanner, a novel multi-radio device that performs local reconnaissance and classifies streaming IP cameras with high accuracy in diverse IoT networks.

Findings

High accuracy classification of IP cameras achieved

IoTScanner provides comprehensive network overview

Works without prior knowledge of network credentials

Abstract

In the context of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), a proliferation of wireless connectivity can be expected. That ubiquitous wireless communication will be hard to centrally manage and control, and can be expected to be opaque to end users. As a result, owners and users of physical space are threatened to lose control over their digital environments. In this work, we propose the idea of an IoTScanner. The IoTScanner integrates a range of radios to allow local reconnaissance of existing wireless infrastructure and participating nodes. It enumerates such devices, identifies connection patterns, and provides valuable insights for technical support and home users alike. Using our IoTScanner, we attempt to classify actively streaming IP cameras from other non-camera devices using simple heuristics. We show that our classification approach achieves a high accuracy in an IoT setting consisting of a large number of IoT devices. While related work usually focuses on detecting either the infrastructure, or eavesdropping on traffic from a specific node, we focus on providing a general overview of operations in all observed networks. We do not assume prior knowledge of used SSIDs, preshared passwords, or similar.