Currently, the methods of identification of devices of the Internet of things are one of the main topics due to the increase in the number of devices connected to the Internet. The use of a large number of heterogeneous physical and logical identifiers led to the fact that there were instances of their falsification, which threatens many vital processes. This article describes the architectural network model of a software and hardware complex for IoT device identification. Using the digital object architecture (DOA), it is possible to implement any of the heterogeneous identifiers to create a unique IoT snapshot of the device and store it with a unique global identifier. The article presents a method and developed the software-hardware system for enabling and facilitating the use of DOA for Identify IoT-devices. It is also proposed to develop a software and hardware complex for testing the identification procedure of “smart” devices using. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018.