Large Language Models for Real-World IoT Device Identification

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mahmood, Rameen, Ahmed, Tousif, Peddinti, Sai Teja, Huang, Danny Yuxing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mahmood, Rameen
Ahmed, Tousif
Peddinti, Sai Teja
Huang, Danny Yuxing
author_facet Mahmood, Rameen
Ahmed, Tousif
Peddinti, Sai Teja
Huang, Danny Yuxing
contents The rapid expansion of IoT devices has outpaced current identification methods, creating significant risks for security, privacy, and network accountability. These challenges are heightened in open-world environments, where traffic metadata is often incomplete, noisy, or intentionally obfuscated. We introduce a semantic inference pipeline that reframes device identification as a language modeling task over heterogeneous network metadata. To construct reliable supervision, we generate high-fidelity vendor labels for the IoT Inspector dataset, the largest real-world IoT traffic corpus, using an ensemble of large language models guided by mutual-information and entropy-based stability scores. We then instruction-tune a quantized LLaMA3.18B model with curriculum learning to support generalization under sparsity and long-tail vendor distributions. Our model achieves 98.25% top-1 accuracy and 90.73% macro accuracy across 2,015 vendors while maintaining resilience to missing fields, protocol drift, and adversarial manipulation. Evaluation on an independent IoT testbed, coupled with explanation quality and adversarial stress tests, demonstrates that instruction-tuned LLMs provide a scalable and interpretable foundation for real-world device identification at scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13817
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Large Language Models for Real-World IoT Device Identification
Mahmood, Rameen
Ahmed, Tousif
Peddinti, Sai Teja
Huang, Danny Yuxing
Machine Learning
Networking and Internet Architecture
The rapid expansion of IoT devices has outpaced current identification methods, creating significant risks for security, privacy, and network accountability. These challenges are heightened in open-world environments, where traffic metadata is often incomplete, noisy, or intentionally obfuscated. We introduce a semantic inference pipeline that reframes device identification as a language modeling task over heterogeneous network metadata. To construct reliable supervision, we generate high-fidelity vendor labels for the IoT Inspector dataset, the largest real-world IoT traffic corpus, using an ensemble of large language models guided by mutual-information and entropy-based stability scores. We then instruction-tune a quantized LLaMA3.18B model with curriculum learning to support generalization under sparsity and long-tail vendor distributions. Our model achieves 98.25% top-1 accuracy and 90.73% macro accuracy across 2,015 vendors while maintaining resilience to missing fields, protocol drift, and adversarial manipulation. Evaluation on an independent IoT testbed, coupled with explanation quality and adversarial stress tests, demonstrates that instruction-tuned LLMs provide a scalable and interpretable foundation for real-world device identification at scale.
title Large Language Models for Real-World IoT Device Identification
topic Machine Learning
Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13817