DDoS Attack Detection with Machine Learning

Abstract

Nowadays, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a major issue in internet security. These attacks target servers or network infrastructure. Similar to an unanticipated traffic jam on highway (lagging/crash) that prevent normal traffic reach to destination. DDoS may prevent users to access any system services. Researchers and scientists have developed numerous methods and algorithms to improve the performance of DDoS detection. In this paper, a DDoS detection method utilizing machine learning is proposed. There are three type of supervised machine learning classification methods which are K-Nearest Neighbor, Multilayer Perceptron and Random Forest, are applied in the proposed work to assess the accuracy of the model in training and testing processes. RF classification provides robustness and interpretability, MLP offers deep learning capabilities for complex patterns, and K-NN delivers simplicity and adaptability for instance-based learning. Together, these methods can contribute to a comprehensive DDoS attack detection system using machine learning. There are two types of classification setups: binary and multi-class classification. Binary classification involves identifying traffic as either a DDoS attack or normal using the NSL-KDD dataset. Multi-class classification, on the other hand, distinguishes between various types of DDoS attacks (such as DoS, Probe, U2R, and Sybil) and normal traffic using the NSL-KDD dataset. Feature engineering is also involved in this experiment to convert the categorical features into numerical values for detecting DDoS attack. Our model's performance was effective compared to other machine learning methods. RF achieved the highest accuracy rates: 99.35% in binary classification and 97.71% in multi-class classification. K-NN followed with 99.15% in binary and 97.35% in multi-class classification, while MLP achieved 90.63% in binary and 84.33% in multi-class classification.

Keywords

• ddos attack
• random forest
• machine learning
• multilayer perceptron
• k-nearest neighbor