Detecting DDoS Threats Using Supervised Machine Learning for Traffic Classification in Software Defined Networking

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack represents a major threat to service providers. More specifically, a DDoS attack aims to disrupt and deny services to legitimate users by overwhelming the target with a massive number of malicious requests. A cyberattack of this kind is likely to result in tremendous economic losses for businesses and service providers due to increasing both operating and financial costs. In recent years, machine learning (ML) techniques have been widely used to prevent DDoS attacks. Indeed, many defense systems have been transformed into smart and intelligent systems through the use of ML techniques, which allow them to defeat DDoS attacks. This paper analyzes recent studies concerning DDoS detection methods that have adapted single and hybrid ML approaches in modern networking environments. Additionally, the paper discusses different DDoS defense systems based on ML techniques that make use of a virtualized environment, including cloud computing, software-defined network, and network functions virtualization environments. As the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has been the subject of significant research attention in recent years, the paper also discusses ML approaches as security solutions against DDoS attacks in IoT environments. Furthermore, the paper recommends a number of directions for future research. This paper is intended to assist the research community with the design and development of effective defense systems capable of overcoming different types of DDoS attacks.

The complexity of handling modern apps is causing older network architectures to struggle. As a result, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has developed into a paradigm-shifting network framework that enables administrators to exercise programmable control over whole network infrastructures. This development makes it easier to configure and operate large networks, but it also adds vulnerabilities, including the possibility of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults that could take down the SDN controller. Integrating security tools like firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and anti-DDoS solutions is crucial to reducing this danger. In the context of SDN, leveraging the analytical power of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to analyse network traffic patterns is a key tactic for fending off DDoS attacks. Effective defence systems are supported by these ML models, which can distinguish between normal network behaviour and DDoS assault traffic with ease. Decision trees (DT), support vector machines (SVM), and artificial neural networks (ANN) are examples of supervised ML techniques that have evolved into crucial tools in this field. These algorithms are developed utilising datasets with annotations that include examples of both legitimate and malicious network traffic. Once trained, the models may be used to instantly categorise incoming traffic, making it easier to identify and contain any DDoS attacks in real-time.

Internet-based computing has lead to an emergence of a large number of threats. One of the major threat is DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Recent incidents have shown that DDoS attacks have the capability of shutting a business not for a day but weeks. DDoS attacks have a greater impact on multi-tenant clouds than traditional infrastructure. DDoS attacks in the cloud, take the shape of EDoS (Economic denial of sustainability) attacks. In EDoS, instead of “Service Denial”, economic harms occur due to fake resource usage and subsequent addition or buying of resources using on-demand provisioning. To detect and mitigate DDoS attacks in the cloud, we argue that on-demand resource allocation (known as auto-scaling) should also be looked, in addition to network or application layer mitigation. We have proposed a novel mitigation strategy, DARAC, which makes auto-scaling decisions by accurately differentiating between legitimate requests and attacker traffic. Attacker traffic is detected and dropped based on human behavior analysis based detection. We also argue that most of the solutions in the literature, do not pay much attention to the service quality to legitimate requests during an attack. We calculate the share of legitimate clients in resource addition/buying and make subsequent accurate auto-scaling decisions. Experimental results show that DARAC mitigates various DDoS attack sets and take accurate and quick auto-scaling decisions for various legitimate and attacker traffic combinations saving from EDoS. We also show how proposed mechanism could make “arms-race” very difficult for the attackers as the resource need to defeat DARAC mechanism on a very small capacity server is huge. Results also show significant improvements in the average response time of the web-service under attack, in addition to infrastructure cost savings up to 50 % in heavy attack cases.KeywordsCloud ComputingVirtual MachineAttack ScenarioIdle ResourceCloud ConsumerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Background & Objective: Detecting and mitigating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is a serious problem. In addition, new features and network deployments such as Software- Defined Networking (SDN) may open the door for new threats that did not previously exist. : Recent publications and patent are reviewed to find new techniques developed for integrating different mechanisms to secure networks against DDoS. Methods: This work presents a simple model for integrating different mechanisms to secure both SDN and legacy network in a hybrid cloud environment, it is called FocusON. It aims at mitigating DDoS attacks of a victim network. In addition, separating network monitoring from its control aims at mitigating DDoS attacks of a victim network. Traffic pattern analysis is apart from attack detection mechanism that gives a conceptual representation of a specific kind of DDoS attacks. DDoS detection is a completely automated process. Once called, for the reaction, the active response will be taken against the real IP source of the attacker. : The communication time overhead was tested in order to evaluate the remote server response time in case of deploying our proposed model mechanisms and without our proposed model. : Here we introduce a response mechanism that consists of an analysis of event logs, traffic patterns, and IP traceback. The proposed model categorizes the underlying network according to the location into a victim network and the source of attack (public cloud). Results & Conclusion:: The proposed model implemented in a hybrid cloud environment using the network of SDN and legacy network. The experimental setup was built using our network lab connected to the Amazon public cloud.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new network construction. But due to its construction, SDN is vulnerable to be attacked by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. So it is important to detect DDoS attack in SDN network. This paper presents a DDoS detection scheme based on k-means algorithm in SDN environment. The establishment of this scheme is based on the two hypotheses that the daily network works normally most of the time, and there is a significant difference between the data characteristics of normal situation and abnormal situation. At the same time, these two hypotheses are also true to the daily network condition. After demonstrating the validity of k-means clustering algorithm, the paper proposes 5 flow table features that can be used to detect DDoS attacks. Finally, the DDoS detection scheme was tested by simulation experiment. The test results showed that the method proposed by the author could effectively detect DDoS, with an average success rate of 97.78%.

This study focuses on the security of 5G mobile network major technology called Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) and its susceptibility to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The goal of the research is to address the effects of DDoS attacks and implement effective mitigation techniques. Several supervised Machine Learning (ML) techniques, which include Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbour, Logistics Regression, and Blending/Stack Model, are evaluated using multiple performance metrics such as accuracy, detection/recall, F1-Measure, Matthew’s correlation coefficient, Receiver Operating Characteristic, and Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic. According to literature, ML algorithms achieve the best performance in mitigating DDoS attacks, therefore, they can be optimized to enhance their effectiveness. The research provides an overview of the existing mitigation schemes in the MEC and proposes a DDoS mitigation scheme. The findings show that hybrid models outperformed traditional ML models. Among the mitigation techniques evaluated, RF proved to be the most effective in mitigating DDoS attacks in MEC.

Detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks with moving target defense approach based on automated flow classification in SDN networks

Exploring current solutions against DDoS attacks in SDN environment

The number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using IoT devices has increased in recent years. Reasons for this growth include the security limitations of IoT devices, the number of devices, and their geographic distribution. Developing mechanisms to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks in this scenario is a current challenge in the area of network security. In the literature review, it is seen that recent academic works still tries to find the best way to combat this type of threat, with proposals that need to be tested against modern datasets that contain a diversity of modern denial of service attacks. This work proposes a detection module for an IoT controller that uses Machine Learning (ML) techniques to classify network traffic. The system was designed in the Software-Defined Networks (SDN) context and evaluated on an emulated platform using three actual and well-know datasets present in the literature. The results, at a sampling rate (SR) of 20% of network traffic, show a high precision (PR), above 93%, a low false alarm rate (FAR), and detection rate (DR) of attacks above 96%, using a low profile emulated device.

Fiber optic networks (FONs) are considered the backbone of telecom companies worldwide. However, the network elements of FONs are scattered over a wide area and managed through a centralized controller based on intelligent devices and the internet of things (IoT), with actuators used to perform specific tasks at remote locations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many telecom companies advised their employees to manage the network using the public internet (e.g., working from home while connected to an IoT network). Theses IoT devices mostly have weak security algorithms that are easily taken-over by hackers, and therefore can generate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in FONs. A DDoS attack is one of the most severe cyberattack types, and can negatively affect the stability and quality of managing networks. Nowadays, software-defined networks (SDN) constitute a new approach that simplifies how the network can be managed through a centralized controller. Moreover, machine learning algorithms allow the detection of incoming malicious traffic with high accuracy. Therefore, combining SDN and ML approaches can lead to detecting and stopping DDoS attacks quickly and efficiently, especially compared to traditional methods. In this paper, we evaluated six ML models: Logistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, and Random Forest. The accuracy reached 100% while detecting DDoS attacks in FON with two approaches: (1) using SVM with three features (SOS, SSIP, and RPF) and (2) using Random Forest with five features (SOS, SSIP, RPF, SDFP, and SDFB). The training time for the first approach was 14.3 s, whereas the second approach only requires 0.18 s; hence, the second approach was utilized for deployment.

The software defined network (SDN) collects network traffic data and proactively manages networks. SDN’s programmability makes it excellent for developing distributed applications, cybersecurity, and decentralized network control in multitenant data centers. This exceptional architecture is vulnerable to security concerns, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks can be very serious due to the fact that they prevent authentic users from accessing, temporarily or indefinitely, resources they would normally expect to have. Moreover, there are continuous efforts from attackers to produce new techniques to avoid detection. Furthermore, many existing DDoS detection methods now in use have a high potential for producing false positives. This motivates us to provide an overview of the research studies that have already been conducted in this area and point out the strengths and weaknesses of each of those approaches. Hence, adopting an optimal detection method is necessary to overcome these issues. Thus, it is crucial to accurately detect abnormal flows to maintain the availability and security of the network. In this work, we propose hybrid deep learning algorithms, which are the long short-term memory network (LSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) with a stack autoencoder for DDoS attack detection and checkpoint network, which is a fault tolerance strategy for long-running processes. The proposed approach is trained and tested with the aid of two DDoS attack datasets in the SDN environment: the DDoS attack SDN dataset and Botnet dataset. The results show that the proposed model achieves a very high accuracy, reaching 99.99% in training, 99.92% in validation, and 100% in precision, recall, and F1 score with the DDoS attack SDN dataset. Also, it achieves 100% in all metrics with the Botnet dataset. Experimental results reveal that our proposed model has a high feature extraction ability and high performance in detecting attacks. All performance metrics indicate that the proposed approach is appropriate for a real-world flow detection environment.

The rapid growth of the internet and the increasing reliance on digital infrastructures have posed significant challenges to cybersecurity. Among the other variants of attacks, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have emerged as one of the most destructive and common threats. These attacks disrupt or slow down network services by overwhelming the network infrastructure with a massive volume of malicious traffic. To effectively identify and mitigate DDoS attacks, machine learning techniques have been extensively employed in intrusion detection systems. Machine learning approaches offer the advantage of automating the detection process by learning patterns and characteristics of DDoS attacks from historical data. Researchers have explored various machine learning algorithms such as K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Naïve Bayes to classify and detect DDoS attacks. These algorithms leverage features extracted from network traffic data, including packet size, packet delay patterns, and traffic behaviour, to differentiate between normal and malicious traffic.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is the new era of networking technology based on a centralized controller that separates the switch hardware from its operating software. The most important challenge is the security of SDN and the most prominent attack is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Some of the research work done so far detects DDoS attacks using a threshold, which is usually assumed without proper scientific reason and hence may not be always accurate. The mitigation techniques used by some researchers block the host from sending the network traffic beyond a threshold, by installing drop rules in the flow table of the switch connected to that host. Doing so will not only block the attack traffic but also the genuine ones from other applications of that host. In this paper, we propose a model that calculates the threshold limit for the type of applications sending data to a particular switch, in real-time using a machine learning (ML) model, and determines whether that application traffic is DDoS traffic. After the detection, only application type sending DDoS traffic is blocked while other genuine applications are allowed to send the network traffic without any interruption. The use of a dynamic threshold, based on the current network traffic, will help in detecting DDoS efficiently.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a paradigm for the networks, where the control planes and data planes are separated. It provides centralized network control by separating the network’s control logic from the underlying hardware devices. However, like traditional networks SDN is also susceptible to Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This paper aims to detect and mitigate DoS and DDoS attacks in an SDN environment using an entropy-based approach. The proposed mechanism calculates the entropy of the network over the collected traffic, and derives a dynamic threshold according to the network traffic conditions to determine whether the environment is subject to DoS or DDoS attacks. In the event of the attack, the proposed mechanism installs a drop flow rule into underlying forwarding devices, discarding the traffic sent from attacking host to victim host

Detecting flooding DDoS attacks in software defined networks using supervised learning techniques