CNN-based IoT Device Identification: A Comparative Study on Payload vs. Fingerprint

The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced a massive influx of devices into the market, bringing with them significant security vulnerabilities. In this diverse ecosystem, robust IoT device identification is a critical preventive measure for network security and vulnerability management. This study proposes a deep learning-based method to identify IoT devices using the Aalto dataset. We employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to classify devices by converting network packet payloads into pseudo-images. Furthermore, we compare the performance of this payload-based approach against a feature-based fingerprinting method. Our results indicate that while the fingerprint-based method is significantly faster (approximately 10x), the payload-based image classification achieves comparable accuracy, highlighting the trade-offs between computational efficiency and data granularity in IoT security.