DeviceRadar: Online IoT Device Fingerprinting in ISPs using Programmable Switches

TL;DR

DeviceRadar is an innovative online IoT device fingerprinting framework that leverages programmable switches to identify devices accurately and in real-time within ISP networks, overcoming data obscuration and high traffic challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fingerprinting method based on key packets and spatial relationships, enabling deployment on programmable switches for line-speed processing.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across 77 IoT devices.

Handles 40 Gbps traffic with only 1.3% of GPU processing time.

Operates effectively despite network middleboxes obscuring data.

Abstract

Device fingerprinting can be used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to identify vulnerable IoT devices for early prevention of threats. However, due to the wide deployment of middleboxes in ISP networks, some important data, e.g., 5-tuples and flow statistics, are often obscured, rendering many existing approaches invalid. It is further challenged by the high-speed traffic of hundreds of terabytes per day in ISP networks. This paper proposes DeviceRadar, an online IoT device fingerprinting framework that achieves accurate, real-time processing in ISPs using programmable switches. We innovatively exploit "key packets" as a basis of fingerprints only using packet sizes and directions, which appear periodically while exhibiting differences across different IoT devices. To utilize them, we propose a packet size embedding model to discover the spatial relationships between packets. Meanwhile, we design an algorithm to extract the "key packets" of each device, and propose an approach that jointly considers the spatial relationships and the key packets to produce a neighboring key packet distribution, which can serve as a feature vector for machine learning models for inference. Last, we design a model transformation method and a feature extraction process to deploy the model on a programmable data plane within its constrained arithmetic operations and memory to achieve line-speed processing. Our experiments show that DeviceRadar can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy across 77 IoT devices with 40 Gbps throughput, and requires only 1.3% of the processing time compared to GPU-accelerated approaches.