Machine Learning Based Effective Classification of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) is a deadliest weapon which overwhelm the server or network by sending flood of packets towards it. The attack disrupts the services running on the target thereby blocking the legitimate traffic accessing its services. Various advanced machine learning techniques have been applied for detection of different types of DDoS attacks but still the attack remains a potential threat to the world. There are mainly two broad categories of machine learning techniques: supervised machine learning approach and unsupervised machine learning approach. Supervised machine learning approach requires labelled attack traffic datasets whereas unsupervised machine learning approach analyses incoming network traffic and then categorizes it. In this paper we have attempted to apply four different classifiers for the detection of DDoS attacks. The four classifiers applied are Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes, K- Nearest Neighbor and Artificial Neural Network. The chosen classifiers provide stable results when there is a large dataset. We compared their detection accuracy on KDD dataset which is a benchmark dataset in the field of network security. This paper is novel as it explains each pre-processing step with python conversion functions and explained in detail all the classifiers and detection accuracy with their functions in python as well.