Distributed denial of service attacks classification system using features selection and ensemble techniques

Abstract

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are expanding threat to online services and websites. These attacks overwhelm targets with traffic from multiple sources to exhaust resources and make services unavailable. The frequency of DDoS attacks exhibits an ongoing upward trajectory over time. This persistent escalation highlights the need for effective countermeasures. While machine learning approaches have been extensively investigated for binary classification of DDoS attacks, multi-class classification has received comparatively less examination in the literature despite its greater practical utility. In this paper, we propose an intrusion detection system for detecting and classifying DDoS attacks, based on two main axes: feature selection for selecting the best relevant features and ensemble learning technique for improving performance by combining weak learners. The proposed model has been trained and evaluated on the CICDDoS2019 dataset. Experimental evaluation demonstrates improved performance using a subset of 16 relevant features identified, with a test accuracy of 82.35% attained for discriminating between the 12 classes represented in the dataset. By aggregating attacks sharing common characteristics resulting in 7 classes, the approach achieves surpassing 97% accuracy. Additionally, a binary classification delineating benign and DDoS attacks attain 99.90% accuracy.