Intelligent Detection of Non-Essential IoT Traffic on the Home Gateway

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Palmese, Fabio, Mandalari, Anna Maria, Haddadi, Hamed, Redondi, Alessandro Enrico Cesare
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Palmese, Fabio
Mandalari, Anna Maria
Haddadi, Hamed
Redondi, Alessandro Enrico Cesare
author_facet Palmese, Fabio
Mandalari, Anna Maria
Haddadi, Hamed
Redondi, Alessandro Enrico Cesare
contents The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, particularly in smart home environments, has introduced considerable security and privacy concerns due to their persistent connectivity and interaction with cloud services. Despite advancements in IoT security, effective privacy measures remain uncovered, with existing solutions often relying on cloud-based threat detection that exposes sensitive data or outdated allow-lists that inadequately restrict non-essential network traffic. This work presents ML-IoTrim, a system for detecting and mitigating non-essential IoT traffic (i.e., not influencing the device operations) by analyzing network behavior at the edge, leveraging Machine Learning to classify network destinations. Our approach includes building a labeled dataset based on IoT device behavior and employing a feature-extraction pipeline to enable a binary classification of essential vs. non-essential network destinations. We test our framework in a consumer smart home setup with IoT devices from five categories, demonstrating that the model can accurately identify and block non-essential traffic, including previously unseen destinations, without relying on traditional allow-lists. We implement our solution on a home access point, showing the framework has strong potential for scalable deployment, supporting near-real-time traffic classification in large-scale IoT environments with hundreds of devices. This research advances privacy-aware traffic control in smart homes, paving the way for future developments in IoT device privacy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_18571
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Intelligent Detection of Non-Essential IoT Traffic on the Home Gateway
Palmese, Fabio
Mandalari, Anna Maria
Haddadi, Hamed
Redondi, Alessandro Enrico Cesare
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, particularly in smart home environments, has introduced considerable security and privacy concerns due to their persistent connectivity and interaction with cloud services. Despite advancements in IoT security, effective privacy measures remain uncovered, with existing solutions often relying on cloud-based threat detection that exposes sensitive data or outdated allow-lists that inadequately restrict non-essential network traffic. This work presents ML-IoTrim, a system for detecting and mitigating non-essential IoT traffic (i.e., not influencing the device operations) by analyzing network behavior at the edge, leveraging Machine Learning to classify network destinations. Our approach includes building a labeled dataset based on IoT device behavior and employing a feature-extraction pipeline to enable a binary classification of essential vs. non-essential network destinations. We test our framework in a consumer smart home setup with IoT devices from five categories, demonstrating that the model can accurately identify and block non-essential traffic, including previously unseen destinations, without relying on traditional allow-lists. We implement our solution on a home access point, showing the framework has strong potential for scalable deployment, supporting near-real-time traffic classification in large-scale IoT environments with hundreds of devices. This research advances privacy-aware traffic control in smart homes, paving the way for future developments in IoT device privacy.
title Intelligent Detection of Non-Essential IoT Traffic on the Home Gateway
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18571