GraphIoT: Lightweight IoT Device Detection Based on Graph Classifiers and Incremental Learning

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to growing concerns about the security of IoT devices. A crucial aspect of ensuring their security is IoT device identification, which involves pinpointing the specific type of device. Existing solutions, however, either necessitate complex feature engineering or struggle to handle the ever-increasing number of new devices in open IoT environments. To tackle these challenges, this paper introduces GraphIoT, a lightweight IoT device detection method based on graph classifiers. GraphIoT leverages lightweight flow information, such as packet length, direction, and timestamp, to create an IoT Device Traffic Graph Representation (IoT-DTGR). This representation offers a comprehensive view of IoT device flows while preserving features in bidirectional IoT Device-Gateway interactions. By transforming the IoT device detection problem into a graph classification problem, GraphIoT employs a powerful Graph Neural Network that takes into account both node and edge features, as well as subgraph structures in IoT-DTGRs, to classify graphs and consequently identify device types. Additionally, the paper proposes an incremental learning framework called CL-GraphIoT that continuously learns features of new IoT device flows without forgetting previously learned device features. This is achieved through two strategies: parameter sharing and sample replaying. The paper gathers a real-world dataset from 18 IoT devices and conducts experiments on two datasets: the gathered real-world dataset and an open-source dataset covering 21 IoT device types. The experimental results demonstrate that both GraphIoT and CL-GraphIoT outperform state-of-the-art methods, achieving high accuracy in device detection with fast processing speed.

I. Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) has dramatically changed how we interact with technology, integrating it into everyday objects such as cameras, lights, and appliances. As depicted in Fig. 1, a typical smart home today consists of multiple interconnected IoT devices. Estimates suggest that by 2025, approximately 7.544 billion IoT devices will be in use [1]. With the rapid proliferation of these devices, effective device detection has become essential for ensuring Quality of Service (QoS), enhancing security through intrusion detection, and maintaining robust prevention systems.