A Holistic Approach for Detecting DDoS Attacks by Using Ensemble Unsupervised Machine Learning

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) has been the most prominent attack in cyber-physical system over the last decade. Defending against DDoS attack is not only challenging but also strategic. Tons of new strategies and approaches have been proposed to defend against different types of DDoS attacks. The ongoing battle between the attackers and defenders is full-fledged due to its newest strategies and techniques. Machine learning (ML) has promising outcomes in different research fields including cybersecurity. In this paper, ensemble unsupervised ML approach is used to implement an intrusion detection system which has the noteworthy accuracy to detect DDoS attacks. The goal of this research is to increase the DDoS attack detection accuracy while decreasing the false positive rate. The NSL-KDD dataset and twelve feature sets from existing research are used for experimentation to compare our ensemble results with those of our individual and other existing models.