Multi-Classifier of DDoS Attacks in Computer Networks Built on Neural Networks

Abstract

The great commitment in different areas of computer science for the study of computer networks used to fulfill specific and major business tasks has generated a need for their maintenance and optimal operability. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) is a frequent threat to computer networks because of its disruption to the services they cause. This disruption results in the instability and/or inoperability of the network. There are different classes of DDoS attacks, each with a different mode of operation, so detecting them has become a difficult task for network monitoring and control systems. The objective of this work is based on the exploration and choice of a set of data that represents DDoS attack events, on their treatment in a preprocessing phase, and later, the generation of a model of sequential neural networks of multi-class classification. This is done to identify and classify the various types of DDoS attacks. The result was compared with previous works treating the same dataset used herein. We compared their classification method, against ours. During this research, the CIC DDoS2019 dataset was used. Previous works carried out with this dataset proposed a binary classification approach, our approach is based on multi-classification. Our proposed model was capable of achieving around 94% in metrics such as precision, accuracy, recall and F1 score. The added value of multiclass classification during this work is identified and compared with binary classifications using the models presented in the previous.

Keywords

• computer networks
• data preprocessing
• DDoS attack
• machine learning
• neural networks