Robust Lightweight IoT Device Fingerprinting Under Network Traffic Anomalies

Roya Taheri, Shamik Sengupta

Accurate IoT device identification is essential for network security, yet many existing approaches rely on payload inspection, feature engineering, or long observation windows that limit scalability and often assume stable network conditions despite the inherent variability of real-world IoT traffic. We propose a lightweight IoT device identification approach based on packet headers and locality-sensitive hashing (LSH), generating compact fingerprint representations at packet- and window-level granularities. To evaluate robustness, we consider packet-level traffic anomalies including drop, perturbation, reordering, duplication, and packet injection. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves up to 99% accuracy while maintaining robustness under realistic traffic distortions using short bounded observation windows. Anomalies affecting global traffic structure produce the largest performance degradation, whereas window-level representations improve robustness by reducing sensitivity to localized distortions. The low computational overhead of the proposed approach enables scalable IoT device identification in resource-constrained environments.