A novel framework of DDoS attack detection in network using hybrid heuristic deep learning approaches with attention mechanism

Abstract

The “Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)” threats have become a tool for the hackers, cyber swindlers, and cyber terrorists. Despite the high amount of conventional mitigation mechanisms that are present nowadays, the DDoS threats continue to enhance in severity, volume, and frequency. The DDoS attack has highly affected the availability of the networks for the previous years and still, there is no efficient defense technique against it. Moreover, the new and complex DDoS attacks are increasing on a daily basis but the traditional DDoS attack detection techniques cannot react to these threats. On the other hand, the hackers are employing very innovative strategies to initiate the threats. But, the traditional methods can become effective and reliable when combined with the deep learning-aided approaches. To solve these certain issues, a framework detection mechanism for DDoS attacks utilizes an attention-aided deep learning methodology. The primary thing is the acquisition of data from standard data online sources. Further, from the garnered data, the significant features are drawn out from the “Deep Weighted Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM)” using a “Deep Belief Network (DBN)”, in which the parameters are tuned by employing the recommended Enhanced Gannet Optimization Algorithm (EGOA). This feature extraction operation increases the network performance rate and also diminishes the dimensionality issues. Lastly, the acquired features are transferred to the model of “Attention and Cascaded Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with Residual Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) (ACRNN-RLSTM)” blocks for the DDoS threat detection purpose. This designed network precisely identifies the complex and new attacks, thus it increases the trustworthiness of the network. In the end, the performance of the approach is contrasted with other traditional algorithms. Hence, the simulation outcomes are obtained that prove the system’s efficiency. Also, the outcomes displayed that the designed system overcame the conventional threat detection techniques.