arrow
Return

Detection of application-layer DDoS attacks using machine learning and genetic algorithms

delete2023-12-01
delete3
PRE
AI
D
Dyari Mohammed Sharif *
H
Hakem Beitollahi
DOI:10.1016/j.cose.2023.103511delete
deleteOriginal
deleteOriginal request for help
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Application-layer Distributed Denial of Service (App-DDoS) attacks continue to be a pervasive problem in cybersecurity, despite the availability of various defensive frameworks. This research addresses the challenges associated with App-DDoS detection and presents a highly effective and adaptable solution for detecting various types of App-DDoS attacks. Motivated by the critical need for improved DDoS detection, our approach achieves dual objectives by accurately detecting both known and unknown DDoS attacks while minimizing false alarms. To achieve this, we combine Random Forest (RF), Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and a human with expertise in DDoS to enhance the system's resilience against evolving attack patterns. Furthermore, we prioritize high quality data curation by utilizing multiple datasets, CICIDS2017 and CICDDoS2019, and incorporating GMM to adapt effectively to varying data distributions over time. In addition, we propose a comprehensive feature selection strategy that addresses the false alarm rate and improves classifier performance by utilizing decision tree (DT) feature importance and the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (MRMR) approach. Moreover, we adopt genetic algorithms (GA) for automated hyper-parameter optimization to ensure efficient and effective DDoS detection. Quantitative analysis shows a significant reduction in false alarms to 0.12% (52 out of 45,149 samples), with the RF classifier achieving outstanding accuracy (99.9%), precision (100%), recall (99.8%), and F1 score (99.9%). Handling unknown App-DDoS attacks, our approach demonstrates remarkable performance across all datasets.
Keywords:
DoS
DDoS
Machine learning
Genetic algorithms
Gaussian mixture models

Journal

C
Computers and Security
IF:
5.4
Papers:
4.6K
Citations:
1.4W

Organization

S
Soran University
Scholars:
358
Papers: 385
Citations: 487