Identifying devices with multiple network interface cards in a network

Abstract

A service obtains traffic logs for traffic of a network that has been sent according to a Layer 7 protocol (e.g., SNMP or DNS). The service identifies from the traffic logs device names that appear to correspond to different devices/NICs as names of candidate multi-NIC devices. The service extracts features from names of the candidate multi-NIC devices and generates respective feature vectors. The service can generate 'documents' representing each device name from which it extracts features by determining n-grams of each device name, where a set of n-grams of a device name is treated as a document, and each n-gram is treated as a term in the document. Exemplary features that can be extracted based on a device name document include within-document and cross-document uniqueness scores. The service clusters the feature vectors with unsupervised learning and identifies clusters of a size that satisfies a criterion as corresponding to multi-NIC devices.