Bandwidth control mechanism and extreme gradient boosting algorithm for protecting software-defined networks against DDoS attacks

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture that addresses the limitation of the traditional network by providing centralized management through a central controller that decouples the control and data planes. However, this development has made the controller a severe target for malicious users to execute attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Several schemes have been proposed to mitigate DDoS attacks in SDN, but the challenges still exist. This paper proposes a DDoS mitigation scheme for SDN to ensure accurate attack detection and efficient network resource utilization. The scheme employs two stages: a bandwidth control mechanism and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) Algorithm. The bandwidth control mechanism utilizes an adaptive bandwidth profile-based threshold and bandwidth control algorithm that trigger the XGBoost algorithm in case of threshold violations. The use of multiple bandwidth profiles in setting the threshold ensures the threshold’s adaptivity to consider the network traffic variation and reduce the packets drop ratio, which shows an outstanding result. The XGBoost algorithm classifies network traffic flow that violates a set threshold into normal or abnormal traffic. We evaluated the performance of our scheme using CICDDoS2019, NSL-KDD, and CAIDA datasets. Furthermore, we validated our proposed solution in real-time with the SDN environment. The results obtained show that our scheme protects SDN against DDoS attacks with high accuracy, low error, and efficient utilization of the network resources. The proposed system achieved 99.9% accuracy in detecting DDoS attacks with a low false-positive rate of 0.0002% in SDN.