A Novel Real-Time DDoS Attack Detection Mechanism Based on MDRA Algorithm in Big Data

Abstract

In the wake of the rapid development and wide application of information technology and Internet, our society has come into the information explosion era. Meanwhile, it brings in new and severe challenges to the field of network attack behavior detection due to the explosive growth and high complexity of network traffic. Therefore, an effective and efficient detection mechanism that can detect attack behavior from large scale of network traffic plays an important role. In this paper, we focus on how to distinguish the attack traffic from normal data flows in Big Data and propose a novel real-time DDoS attack detection mechanism based on Multivariate Dimensionality Reduction Analysis (MDRA). In this mechanism, we first reduce the dimensionality of multiple characteristic variables in a network traffic record by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Then, we analyze the correlation of the lower dimensional variables. Finally, the attack traffic can be differentiated from the normal traffic by MDRA and Mahalanobis distance (MD). Compared with previous research methods, our experimental results show that higher precision rate is achieved and it approximates to 100% in True Negative Rate (TNR) for detection; CPU computing time is one-eightieth and memory resource consumption is one-third of the previous detection method based on Multivariate Correlation Analysis (MCA); computing complexity is constant.