EVFDT: An Enhanced Very Fast Decision Tree Algorithm for Detecting Distributed Denial of Service Attack in Cloud-Assisted Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

Due to the scattered nature of DDoS attacks and advancement of new technologies such as cloud-assisted WBAN, it becomes challenging to detect malicious activities by relying on conventional security mechanisms. The detection of such attacks demands an adaptive and incremental learning classifier capable of accurate decision making with less computation. Hence, the DDoS attack detection using existing machine learning techniques requires full data set to be stored in the memory and are not appropriate for real-time network traffic. To overcome these shortcomings, Very Fast Decision Tree (VFDT) algorithm has been proposed in the past that can handle high speed streaming data efficiently. Whilst considering the data generated by WBAN sensors, noise is an obvious aspect that severely affects the accuracy and increases false alarms. In this paper, an enhanced VFDT (EVFDT) is proposed to efficiently detect the occurrence of DDoS attack in cloud-assisted WBAN. EVFDT uses an adaptive tie-breaking threshold for node splitting. To resolve the tree size expansion under extreme noise, a lightweight iterative pruning technique is proposed. To analyze the performance of EVFDT, four metrics are evaluated: classification accuracy, tree size, time, and memory. Simulation results show that EVFDT attains significantly high detection accuracy with fewer false alarms.