{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,20]],"date-time":"2026-07-20T14:12:54Z","timestamp":1784556774442,"version":"3.55.0"},"reference-count":30,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,3,7]],"date-time":"2023-03-07T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1678147200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["61872430"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61872430"]}]},{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["61402342"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61402342"]}]},{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["61772384"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61772384"]}]},{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["2014CB340601"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2014CB340601"]}]},{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["KJ-17-103"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["KJ-17-103"]}]},{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["2020BAA003"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2020BAA003"]}]},{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["2021BAA027"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2021BAA027"]}]},{"name":"National Basic Research Program of China 973 Program","award":["61872430"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61872430"]}]},{"name":"National Basic Research Program of China 973 Program","award":["61402342"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61402342"]}]},{"name":"National Basic Research Program of China 973 Program","award":["61772384"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61772384"]}]},{"name":"National Basic Research Program of China 973 Program","award":["2014CB340601"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2014CB340601"]}]},{"name":"National Basic Research Program of China 973 Program","award":["KJ-17-103"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["KJ-17-103"]}]},{"name":"National Basic Research Program of China 973 Program","award":["2020BAA003"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2020BAA003"]}]},{"name":"National Basic Research Program of China 973 Program","award":["2021BAA027"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2021BAA027"]}]},{"name":"Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory","award":["61872430"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61872430"]}]},{"name":"Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory","award":["61402342"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61402342"]}]},{"name":"Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory","award":["61772384"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61772384"]}]},{"name":"Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory","award":["2014CB340601"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2014CB340601"]}]},{"name":"Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory","award":["KJ-17-103"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["KJ-17-103"]}]},{"name":"Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory","award":["2020BAA003"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2020BAA003"]}]},{"name":"Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory","award":["2021BAA027"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2021BAA027"]}]},{"name":"Hubei Province Key Research and Development Program","award":["61872430"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61872430"]}]},{"name":"Hubei Province Key Research and Development Program","award":["61402342"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61402342"]}]},{"name":"Hubei Province Key Research and Development Program","award":["61772384"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61772384"]}]},{"name":"Hubei Province Key Research and Development Program","award":["2014CB340601"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2014CB340601"]}]},{"name":"Hubei Province Key Research and Development Program","award":["KJ-17-103"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["KJ-17-103"]}]},{"name":"Hubei Province Key Research and Development Program","award":["2020BAA003"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2020BAA003"]}]},{"name":"Hubei Province Key Research and Development Program","award":["2021BAA027"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2021BAA027"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Future Internet"],"abstract":"<jats:p>With the development of IoT, IoT devices have proliferated. With the increasing demands of network management and security evaluation, automatic identification of IoT devices becomes necessary. However, existing works require a lot of manual effort and face the challenge of catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose IoT-Portrait, an automatic IoT device identification framework based on a transformer network. IoT-Portrait automatically acquires information about IoT devices as labels and learns the traffic behavior characteristics of devices through a transformer neural network. Furthermore, for privacy protection and overhead reasons, it is not easy to save all past samples to retrain the classification model when new devices join the network. Therefore, we use a class incremental learning method to train the new model to preserve old classes\u2019 features while learning new devices\u2019 features. We implement a prototype of IoT-Portrait based on our lab environment and open-source database. Experimental results show that IoT-Portrait achieves a high identification rate of up to 99% and is well resistant to catastrophic forgetting with a negligible added cost both in memory and time. It indicates that IoT-Portrait can classify IoT devices effectively and continuously.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/fi15030102","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,3,7]],"date-time":"2023-03-07T02:30:45Z","timestamp":1678156245000},"page":"102","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":15,"title":["IoT-Portrait: Automatically Identifying IoT Devices via Transformer with Incremental Learning"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"15","author":[{"given":"Juan","family":"Wang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"},{"name":"Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing Ministry of Education, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6342-974X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jing","family":"Zhong","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"},{"name":"Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing Ministry of Education, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jiangqi","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"},{"name":"Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing Ministry of Education, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,3,7]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"Statista Research Department (2023, February 01). Number of IoT Devices 2015\u20132025. Available online: https:\/\/www.statista.com\/statistics\/471264\/iot-number-of-connected-devices-worldwide\/things-security-report-q3-2015\/."},{"key":"ref_2","unstructured":"Apthorpe, N., Reisman, D., and Feamster, N. (2017). A smart home is no castle: Privacy vulnerabilities of encrypted iot traffic. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Meidan, Y., Bohadana, M., Shabtai, A., Guarnizo, J.D., Ochoa, M., Tippenhauer, N.O., and Elovici, Y. (2017, January 3\u20137). ProfilIoT: A machine learning approach for IoT device identification based on network traffic analysis. Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Computing, Marrakech, Morocco.","DOI":"10.1145\/3019612.3019878"},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"882","DOI":"10.1109\/TII.2019.2962759","article-title":"Fiden: Intelligent fingerprint learning for attacker identification in the industrial Internet of Things","volume":"17","author":"Chen","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Ind. Inform."},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bezawada, B., Bachani, M., Peterson, J., Shirazi, H., Ray, I., and Ray, I. (2018). Iotsense: Behavioral fingerprinting of iot devices. arXiv.","DOI":"10.1145\/3266444.3266452"},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Miettinen, M., Marchal, S., Hafeez, I., Asokan, N., Sadeghi, A.R., and Tarkoma, S. (2017, January 5\u20138). Iot sentinel: Automated device-type identification for security enforcement in iot. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Atlanta, GA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDCS.2017.283"},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"519","DOI":"10.1109\/TDSC.2014.2369033","article-title":"GTID: A technique for physical device and device type fingerprinting","volume":"12","author":"Radhakrishnan","year":"2014","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Acar, A., Fereidooni, H., Abera, T., Sikder, A.K., Miettinen, M., Aksu, H., Conti, M., Sadeghi, A.R., Uluagac, S., and Uluagac, S. (2020, January 8\u201310). Peek-a-boo: I see your smart home activities, even encrypted!. Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, Linz, Austria.","DOI":"10.1145\/3395351.3399421"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1717","DOI":"10.1109\/TNSM.2021.3130312","article-title":"ByteIoT: A practical IoT device identification system based on packet length distribution","volume":"19","author":"Duan","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manag."},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Aksoy, A., and Gunes, M.H. (2019, January 20\u201324). Automated iot device identification using network traffic. Proceedings of the ICC 2019\u20132019 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Shanghai, China.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICC.2019.8761559"},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Salman, O., Elhajj, I.H., Chehab, A., and Kayssi, A. (2022). A machine learning based framework for IoT device identification and abnormal traffic detection. Trans. Emerg. Telecommun. Technol., 33.","DOI":"10.1002\/ett.3743"},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bai, L., Yao, L., Kanhere, S.S., Wang, X., and Yang, Z. (2018, January 1\u20134). Automatic device classification from network traffic streams of internet of things. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE 43rd Conference on Local Computer Networks, Chicago, IL, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/LCN.2018.8638232"},{"key":"ref_13","first-page":"76","article-title":"Iot device identification using deep learning","volume":"Volume 12","author":"Kotak","year":"2021","journal-title":"Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems"},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"18042","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2017.2747560","article-title":"Network traffic classifier with convolutional and recurrent neural networks for Internet of Things","volume":"5","author":"Carro","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Dong, S., Li, Z., Tang, D., Chen, J., Sun, M., and Zhang, K. (2020, January 5\u20139). Your smart home cannot keep a secret: Towards automated fingerprinting of iot traffic. Proceedings of the 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Taipei, Taiwan.","DOI":"10.1145\/3320269.3384732"},{"key":"ref_16","unstructured":"Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A.N., Kaiser, L., and Polosukhin, I. (2017, January 4\u20139). Attention is all you need. Proceedings of the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2017, Long Beach, CA, USA."},{"key":"ref_17","first-page":"3366","article-title":"A continual learning survey: Defying forgetting in classification tasks","volume":"44","author":"Aljundi","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell."},{"key":"ref_18","unstructured":"Lyon, G.F. (2008). Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning, Insecure.com LLC."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bodenheim, R.C. (2014). Impact of the Shodan Computer Search Engine on Internet-Facing Industrial Control System Devices. [Master\u2019s Thesis, Air Force Institute of Technology Wright-Patterson AFB OH Graduate School of Engineering and Management].","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ijcip.2014.03.001"},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ribeiro, T., Vala, M., and Paiva, A. (2013, January 29\u201331). Censys: A model for distributed embodied cognition. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Edinburgh, UK.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-642-40415-3_5"},{"key":"ref_21","unstructured":"Feng, X., Li, Q., Wang, H., and Sun, L. (2018, January 15\u201317). Acquisitional rule-based engine for discovering Internet-of-Things devices. Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 18), Baltimore, MD, USA."},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1745","DOI":"10.1109\/TMC.2018.2866249","article-title":"Classifying IoT devices in smart environments using network traffic characteristics","volume":"18","author":"Sivanathan","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sivanathan, A., Sherratt, D., Gharakheili, H.H., Radford, A., Wijenayake, C., Vishwanath, A., and Sivaraman, V. (2017, January 1\u20134). Characterizing and classifying IoT traffic in smart cities and campuses. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS), Atlanta, GA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/INFCOMW.2017.8116438"},{"key":"ref_24","unstructured":"(2023, February 01). Dumpcap-The Wireshark Network Analyzer 3.0.0. Available online: https:\/\/www.wireshark.org\/docs\/man-pages\/dumpcap.html."},{"key":"ref_25","unstructured":"(2023, March 01). Curl. Available online: https:\/\/curl.se\/."},{"key":"ref_26","unstructured":"(2023, March 01). Editcap-The Wireshark Network Analyzer 3.0.0. Available online: https:\/\/www.wireshark.org\/docs\/man-pages\/editcap.html."},{"key":"ref_27","unstructured":"(2023, March 01). Tshark-The Wireshark Network Analyzer 3.0.0. Available online: https:\/\/www.wireshark.org\/docs\/man-pages\/tshark.html."},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2935","DOI":"10.1109\/TPAMI.2017.2773081","article-title":"Learning without forgetting","volume":"40","author":"Li","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell."},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Rebuffi, S.A., Kolesnikov, A., Sperl, G., and Lampert, C.H. (2017, January 21\u201326). icarl: Incremental classifier and representation learning. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Honolulu, HI, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/CVPR.2017.587"},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Belouadah, E., and Popescu, A. (2018, January 8\u201314). DeeSIL: Deep-shallow incremental learning. Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) Workshops, Munich, Germany.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-11012-3_11"}],"container-title":["Future Internet"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1999-5903\/15\/3\/102\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,10]],"date-time":"2025-10-10T18:49:38Z","timestamp":1760122178000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1999-5903\/15\/3\/102"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2023,3,7]]},"references-count":30,"journal-issue":{"issue":"3","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,3]]}},"alternative-id":["fi15030102"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/fi15030102","relation":{},"ISSN":["1999-5903"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1999-5903","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2023,3,7]]}}}