A chaotic measure for cognitive machine classification of distributed denial of service attacks

Abstract

Today's evolving cyber security threats demand new, modern, and cognitive computing approaches to network security systems. In the early years of the Internet, a simple packet inspection firewall was adequate to stop the then-contemporary attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS), ports scans, and phishing. Since then, DoS has evolved to include Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, especially against the Domain Name Service (DNS). DNS based DDoS amplification attacks cannot be stopped easily by traditional signature based detection mechanisms because the attack packets contain authentic data, and signature based detection systems look for specific attack-byte patterns. This paper proposes a chaos based complexity measure and a cognitive machine classification algorithm to detect DNS DDoS amplification attacks. In particular, this paper computes the Lyapunov exponent to measure the complexity of a flow of packets, and classifies the traffic as either normal or anomalous, based on the magnitude of the computed exponent. Preliminary results show the proposed chaotic measure achieved a detection (classification) accuracy of about 66%, which is greater than that reported in the literature. This approach is capable of not only detecting offline threats, but has the potential of being applied over live traffic flows using DNS filters.