English

Inferring Networked Device Categories from Low-Level Activity Indicators

Networking and Internet Architecture 2017-09-05 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We study the problem of inferring the type of a networked device in a home network by leveraging low level traffic activity indicators seen at commodity home gateways. We analyze a dataset of detailed device network activity obtained from 240 subscriber homes of a large European ISP and extract a number of traffic and spatial fingerprints for individual devices. We develop a two level taxonomy to describe devices onto which we map individual devices using a number of heuristics. We leverage the heuristically derived labels to train classifiers that distinguish device classes based on the traffic and spatial fingerprints of a device. Our results show an accuracy level up to 91% for the coarse level category and up to 84% for the fine grained category. By incorporating information from other sources (e.g., MAC OUI), we are able to further improve accuracy to above 97% and 92%, respectively. Finally, we also extract a set of simple and human-readable rules that concisely capture the behaviour of these distinct device categories.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.00348,
  title  = {Inferring Networked Device Categories from Low-Level Activity Indicators},
  author = {Kyumars Sheykh Esmaili and Jaideep Chandrashekar and Pascal Le Guyadec},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.00348},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

14 pages, 9 figures, 7 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:30:31.107Z