Towards Effective Detection of Recent DDoS Attacks: A Deep Learning Approach

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a predominant threat to the availability of online services due to their size and frequency. However, developing an effective security mechanism to protect a network from this threat is a big challenge because DDoS uses various attack approaches coupled with several possible combinations. Furthermore, most of the existing deep learning- (DL-) based models pose a high processing overhead or may not perform well to detect the recently reported DDoS attacks as these models use outdated datasets for training and evaluation. To address the issues mentioned earlier, we propose CyDDoS, an integrated intrusion detection system (IDS) framework, which combines an ensemble of feature engineering algorithms with the deep neural network. The ensemble feature selection is based on five machine learning classifiers used to identify and extract the most relevant features used by the predictive model. This approach improves the model performance by processing only a subset of relevant features while reducing the computation requirement. We evaluate the model performance based on CICDDoS2019, a modern and realistic dataset consisting of normal and DDoS attack traffic. The evaluation considers different validation metrics such as accuracy, precision, F1-Score, and recall to argue the effectiveness of the proposed framework against state-of-the-art IDSs.