Detection of Adversarial DDoS Attacks Using Generative Adversarial Networks with Dual Discriminators

Abstract

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) has emerged as a serious and challenging threat to computer networks and information systems’ security and integrity. Before any remedial measures can be implemented, DDoS assaults must first be detected. DDoS attacks can be identified and characterized with satisfactory achievement employing ML (Machine Learning) and DL (Deep Learning). However, new varieties of aggression arise as the technology for DDoS attacks keep evolving. This research explores the impact of a new incarnation of DDoS attack–adversarial DDoS attack. There are established works on ML-based DDoS detection and GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) based adversarial DDoS synthesis. We confirm these findings in our experiments. Experiments in this study involve the extension and application of the GAN, a machine learning framework with symmetric form having two contending neural networks. We synthesize adversarial DDoS attacks utilizing Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks featuring Gradient Penalty (GP-WGAN). Experiment results indicate that the synthesized traffic can traverse the detection systems such as k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Random Forest (RF) without being identified. This observation is a sobering and pessimistic wake-up call, implying that countermeasures to adversarial DDoS attacks are urgently needed. To this problem, we propose a novel DDoS detection framework featuring GAN with Dual Discriminators (GANDD). The additional discriminator is designed to identify adversary DDoS traffic. The proposed GANDD can be an effective solution to adversarial DDoS attacks, as evidenced by the experimental results. We use adversarial DDoS traffic synthesized by GP-WGAN to train GANDD and validate it alongside three other DL technologies: DNN (Deep Neural Network), LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) and GAN. GANDD outperformed the other DL models, demonstrating its protection with a TPR of 84.3%. A more sophisticated test was also conducted to examine GANDD’s ability to handle unseen adversarial attacks. GANDD was evaluated with adversarial traffic not generated from its training data. GANDD still proved effective with a TPR around 71.3% compared to 7.4% of LSTM.