View article

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, e.g., at home, in enterprise environments, and in production lines. To support the advanced functionalities of IoT devices, IoT vendors as well as service and cloud companies operate IoT backends---the focus of this paper. We propose a methodology to identify and locate them by (a) compiling a list of domains used exclusively by major IoT backend providers and (b) then identifying their server IP addresses. We rely on multiple sources, including IoT backend provider documentation, passive DNS data, and active scanning. For analyzing IoT traffic patterns, we rely on passive network flows from a major European ISP.

Our analysis focuses on the top IoT backends and unveils diverse operational strategies---from operating their own infrastructure to utilizing the public cloud. We find that the majority of the top IoT backend providers are located in …