Toward a Better Understanding of IoT Domain Names: A Study of IoT Backend

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Ibrahim Ayoub - , French Association for Internet Co-operation (Author)
  • Martine S. Lenders - , Chair of Distributed and Networked Systems (Author)
  • Benoît Ampeau - , French Association for Internet Co-operation (Author)
  • Sandoche Balakrichenan - , French Association for Internet Co-operation (Author)
  • Kinda Khawam - , Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (Author)
  • Thomas C. Schmidt - , Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (Author)
  • Matthias Wählisch - , Chair of Distributed and Networked Systems, Barkhausen Institut (Author)

Abstract

In this paper, we study Internet of Things (IoT) domain names, the domain names of backend servers on the Internet that are accessed by IoT devices. We investigate how they compare to non-IoT domain names based on their statistical and DNS properties and the feasibility of classifying these two classes of domain names using machine learning (ML). We construct a dataset of IoT domain names by surveying past studies that used testbeds with real IoT devices. For the non-IoT dataset, we use two lists of top-visited websites. We study the statistical and DNS properties of the domain names. We also leverage machine learning and train six models to perform the classification between the two classes of domain names. The word embedding technique we use to get the real-valued vector representation of the domain names is Word2vec. Our statistical analysis highlights significant differences in domain name length, label frequency, and compliance with typical domain name construction guidelines, while our DNS analysis reveals notable variations in resource record availability and configuration between IoT and non-IoT DNS zones. As for classifying IoT and non-IoT domain names using machine learning, Random Forest achieves the highest performance among the models we train, yielding the highest accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Our work offers novel insights to IoT, potentially informing protocol design and aiding in network security and performance monitoring.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)68871-68890
Number of pages20
JournalIEEE Access
Volume13 (2025)
Issue number13
Early online date16 Apr 2025
Publication statusPublished - 25 Apr 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-3825-2807/work/182729640
Scopus 105003815605
Mendeley 1b9cd894-7076-3758-b089-412d9c79c0fa

Keywords

DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards

Subject groups, research areas, subject areas according to Destatis

Keywords

  • Domain names, security, machine learning, IoT