Learning Multilevel Auto-Encoders for DDoS Attack Detection in Smart Grid Network

Abstract

Bidirectional communication infrastructure of smart systems, such as smart grids, are vulnerable to network attacks like distributed denial of services (DDoS) and can be a major concern in the present competitive market. In DDoS attack, multiple compromised nodes in a communication network flood connection requests, bogus data packets or incoming messages to targets like database servers, resulting in denial of services for legitimate users. Recently, machine learning based techniques have been explored by researchers to secure the network from DDoS attacks. Under different attack scenarios on a system, measurements can be observed either in an online manner or batch mode and can be used to build predictive learning systems. In this work, we propose an efficient DDoS attack detection technique based on multilevel auto-encoder based feature learning. We learn multiple levels of shallow and deep auto-encoders in an unsupervised manner which are then used to encode the training and test data for feature generation. A final unified detection model is then learned by combining the multilevel features using and efficient multiple kernel learning (MKL) algorithm. We perform experiments on two benchmark DDoS attack databases and their subsets and compare the results with six recent methods. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the compared methods in terms of prediction accuracy.