Techniques for analyzing traffic originating from a host device in a wireless network to identify one or more virtual machines (VMs) running on the host device and connected to the network via the host device in bridge mode. When a VM is created in bridge mode behind a host device, the traffic originated by the VM will have the source Media Access Layer (MAC) address of the host device. According to techniques described herein, devices and/or components associated with the network may profile the traffic to identify an address of the VM, such as by analyzing dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) packets to determine the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the VM. Once the IP address and the MAC address of the VM is known, the components and/or devices may apply security policies to the VM that may be different than security policies applied to the host device.