Machine Learning Methods for Device Identification Using Wireless Fingerprinting

Abstract: Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) systems increasingly rely on wireless communication standards. In a common industrial scenario, indoor wireless IoT devices communicate with access points to deliver data collected from industrial sensors, robots and factory machines. Due to static or quasi-static locations of IoT devices and access points, historical observations of IoT device channel conditions provide a possibility to precisely identify the device without observing its traditional identifiers (e.g., MAC or IP address). Such device identification methods based on wireless fingerprinting gained increased attention lately as an additional cyber-security mechanism for critical IoT infrastructures. In this paper, we perform a systematic study of a large class of machine learning algorithms for device identification using wireless fingerprints for the most popular cellular and Wi-Fi IoT technologies. We design, implement, deploy, collect relevant data sets, train and test a multitude of machine learning algorithms, as a part of the complete end-to-end solution design for device identification via wireless fingerprinting. The proposed solution is currently being deployed in a real-world industrial IoT environment as part of H2020 project COLLABS.