A collaborative prediction approach to defend against amplified reflection and exploitation attacks

Abstract

An amplified reflection and exploitation-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack allows an attacker to launch a volumetric attack on the target server or network. These attacks exploit network protocols to generate amplified service responses through spoofed requests. Spoofing the source addresses allows attackers to redirect all of the service responses to the victim's device, overwhelming it and rendering it unresponsive to legitimate users. Mitigating amplified reflection and exploitation attacks requires robust defense mechanisms that are capable of promptly identifying and countering the attack traffic while maintaining the availability and integrity of the targeted systems. This paper presents a collaborative prediction approach based on machine learning to mitigate amplified reflection and exploitation attacks. The proposed approach introduces a novel feature selection technique called closeness index of features (CIF) calculation, which filters out less important features and ranks them to identify reduced feature sets. Further, by combining different machine learning classifiers, a voting-based collaborative prediction approach is employed to predict network traffic accurately. To evaluate the proposed technique's effectiveness, experiments were conducted on CICDDoS2019 datasets. The results showed impressive performance, achieving an average accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score of 99.99%, 99.65%, 99.28% and 99.46%, respectively. Furthermore, evaluations were conducted by using AUC-ROC curve analysis and the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) statistical rate to analyze the approach's effectiveness on class imbalance datasets. The findings demonstrated that the proposed approach outperforms recent approaches in terms of performance. Overall, the proposed approach presents a robust machine learning-based solution to defend against amplified reflection and exploitation attacks, showcasing significant improvements in prediction accuracy and effectiveness compared to existing approaches.

Keywords

• cybersecurity
• machine learning
• reflection attack
• exploitation attack
• ddos attack