Edge Device Identification Based on Federated Learning and Network Traffic Feature Engineering

With the ubiquitous deployment and applications of Internet of Things (IoT), security issues pose a critical challenge to IoT devices. External attackers often utilize vulnerable IoT devices to invade the target’s internal network and then further cause a security threat to the whole network. To prevent such attacks, it is necessary to develop a security mechanism to control the access of suspicious IoT devices and manage the internal devices. In recent years, deep learning (DL) algorithm has been widely used in the field of edge device identification (EDI), and has made great achievements. However, these previous methods are essentially centralized learning-based EDI (CentEDI) that trains all data together, which can not guarantee data security and not conducive to deployment on edge devices. To address this problem, we introduce a federated learning-based EDI (FedeEDI) method via network traffic to automatically identify edge devices connected to the whole network. Experimental results show that the training efficiency of our proposed FedeEDI method is much higher than that of the CentEDI method, although its classification accuracy is slightly reduced. In contrast to the CentEDI method, the proposed FedeEDI method has two main advantages: faster training speed and safer training process.