Application Layer Distributed Denial Of Service Attacks Research Articles

SDN and application layer DDoS attacks detection in IoT devices by attention‐based Bi‐LSTM‐CNN

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) is connecting more devices every day. Security is critical to ensure that the devices operate in a trusted environment. The lack of proper IoT security encourages cybercriminals to target many smart devices across the network and gain sensitive information. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are common in the IoT infrastructure and involve hijacking IoT devices to consume resources and interrupt services. This may specifically vandalize the application running the service that the end users are trying to access (application layer DDoS attacks) or flood the network bandwidth leading to network failure (software defined network DDoS attacks). This article proposes a hybrid attention‐based bidirectional long short term memory (LSTM) with convolutional neural networks (CNN) to identify DDoS attacks in the application layer and SDN. We deploy several other machine learning models like logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, support vector machines, K‐nearest neighbors, extreme gradient boosting, artificial neural networks, CNN, LSTM, CNN‐LSTM to evaluate the performance of our proposed model. The evaluation metrics considered for the study are accuracy, precision, recall, and F‐1 score. The experimental analysis on multiple datasets exhibits that the proposed model performs the classification efficiently with an accuracy of 99.74% and 99.98%.

Effective and Efficient DDoS Attack Detection Using Deep Learning Algorithm, Multi-Layer Perceptron

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks pose an increasing threat to businesses and government agencies. They harm internet businesses, limit access to information and services, and damage corporate brands. Attackers use application layer DDoS attacks that are not easily detectable because of impersonating authentic users. In this study, we address novel application layer DDoS attacks by analyzing the characteristics of incoming packets, including the size of HTTP frame packets, the number of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses sent, constant mappings of ports, and the number of IP addresses using proxy IP. We analyzed client behavior in public attacks using standard datasets, the CTU-13 dataset, real weblogs (dataset) from our organization, and experimentally created datasets from DDoS attack tools: Slow Lairs, Hulk, Golden Eyes, and Xerex. A multilayer perceptron (MLP), a deep learning algorithm, is used to evaluate the effectiveness of metrics-based attack detection. Simulation results show that the proposed MLP classification algorithm has an efficiency of 98.99% in detecting DDoS attacks. The performance of our proposed technique provided the lowest value of false positives of 2.11% compared to conventional classifiers, i.e., Naïve Bayes, Decision Stump, Logistic Model Tree, Naïve Bayes Updateable, Naïve Bayes Multinomial Text, AdaBoostM1, Attribute Selected Classifier, Iterative Classifier, and OneR.

Efficient model for detecting application layer distributed denial of service attacks

The increasing advancement of technologies and communication infrastructures has been posing threats to the internet services. One of the most powerful attack weapons for disrupting web-based services is the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The sophisticated nature of attack tools being created and used for launching attacks on target systems makes it difficult to distinguish between normal and attack traffic. Consequently, there is a need to detect application layer DDoS attacks from network traffic efficiently. This paper proposes a detection system coined eXtreme gradient boosting (XGB-DDoS) using a tree-based ensemble model known as XGBoost to detect application layer DDoS attacks. The Canadian institute for cybersecurity intrusion detection systems (CIC IDS) 2017 dataset consisting of both benign and malicious attacks was used in training and testing of the proposed model. The performance results of the proposed model indicate that the accuracy rate, recall, precision rate, and F1-score of XGB-DDoS are 0.999, 0.997, 0.995, and 0.996, respectively, as against those of k-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), principal component analysis (PCA) hybridized with XGBoost, and KNN with SVM. So, the XGB-DDoS detection model did better than the models that were chosen. This shows that it is good at finding application layer DDoS attacks.

Deep Generative Learning Models for Cloud Intrusion Detection Systems.

Intrusion detection (ID) on the cloud environment has received paramount interest over the last few years. Among the latest approaches, machine learning-based ID methods allow us to discover unknown attacks. However, due to the lack of malicious samples and the rapid evolution of diverse attacks, constructing a cloud ID system (IDS) that is robust to a wide range of unknown attacks remains challenging. In this article, we propose a novel solution to enable robust cloud IDSs using deep neural networks. Specifically, we develop two deep generative models to synthesize malicious samples on the cloud systems. The first model, conditional denoising adversarial autoencoder (CDAAE), is used to generate specific types of malicious samples. The second model (CDAEE-KNN) is a hybrid of CDAAE and the K -nearest neighbor algorithm to generate malicious borderline samples that further improve the accuracy of a cloud IDS. The synthesized samples are merged with the original samples to form the augmented datasets. Three machine learning algorithms are trained on the augmented datasets and their effectiveness is analyzed. The experiments conducted on four popular IDS datasets show that our proposed techniques significantly improve the accuracy of the cloud IDSs compared with the baseline technique and the state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, our models also enhance the accuracy of machine learning algorithms in detecting some currently challenging distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, including low-rate DDoS attacks and application layer DDoS attacks.

Detection of Application-Layer DDoS Attacks Produced by Various Freely Accessible Toolkits Using Machine Learning

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a growing threat to online services, and various methods have been developed to detect them. However, past research has mainly focused on identifying attack patterns and types, without specifically addressing the role of freely available DDoS attack tools in the escalation of these attacks. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the impact of the easy availability of DDoS attack tools on the frequency and severity of attacks. In this paper, a machine learning solution to detect DDoS attacks is proposed, which employs a feature selection technique to enhance its speed and efficiency, resulting in a substantial reduction in the feature subset. The provided evaluation metrics demonstrate that the model has a high accuracy level of 99.9%, a precision score of 96%, a recall score of 98%, and an F1 score of 97%. Moreover, the examination found that by utilizing a deliberate approach for feature selection, our model’s efficacy was massively raised.

Securing Cloud Computing from Flash Crowd Attack Using Ensemble Intrusion Detection System

Flash Crowd attacks are a form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that is becoming increasingly difficult to detect due to its ability to imitate normal user behavior in Cloud Computing (CC). Botnets are often used by attackers to perform a wide range of DDoS attacks. With advancements in technology, bots are now able to simulate DDoS attacks as flash crowd events, making them difficult to detect. When it comes to application layer DDoS attacks, the Flash Crowd attack that occurs during a Flash Event is viewed as the most intricate issue. This is mainly because it can imitate typical user behavior, leading to a substantial influx of requests that can overwhelm the server by consuming either its network bandwidth or resources. Therefore, identifying these types of attacks on web servers has become crucial, particularly in the CC. In this article, an efficient intrusion detection method is proposed based on White Shark Optimizer and ensemble classifier (Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and LighGBM). Experiments were conducted using a CICIDS 2017 dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in real-life situations. The proposed IDS achieved superior results, with 95.84% accuracy, 96.15% precision, 95.54% recall, and 95.84% F1 measure. Flash crowd attacks are challenging to detect, but the proposed IDS has proven its effectiveness in identifying such attacks in CC and holds potential for future improvement.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Automatic Diagnostic System for AL-DDoS Attacks Detection

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are one of the main threats to information security. The purpose of DDoS attacks at the network (IP) and transport (TCP) layers is to consume the network bandwidth and deny service to legitimate users of the target system. Application layer DDoS attacks (AL-DDoS) can be organized against many different applications. Many of these attacks target HTTP, in which case their goal is to deplete the resources of web services. Various schemes have been proposed to detect DDoS attacks on network and transport layers. There are very few works being done to detect AL-DDoS attacks. The development of an intelligent system automatically detecting AL-DDoS attacks in advance is very necessary. In this paper to detect AL-DDoS attacks a deep learning model based on the Convolutional Neural Network is proposed. To simulate the AL-DDoS attack detection process, while in testing of the model on CSE-CIC-IDS2018 DDoS and CSIC 2010 datasets, 0.9974 and 0.9059 accuracy values were obtained, respectively.

DDoS Attacks Detection in the Application Layer Using Three Level Machine Learning Classification Architecture

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is an ever-changing type of attack in cybersecurity, especially with the growing demand for cloud and web services raising a never-ending challenge in the lucrative business. DDoS attacks disrupt users' access to the targeted online services leading to significant business loss. This article presents a three-level architecture for detecting DDoS attacks at the application layer. The first level is responsible for selecting the best features of the samples and classifying the traffic into either benign or malicious, then the second level consists of a hard voting classifier to identify the type of the DDoS source: UDP, TCP, or Mixed-based. Finally, the last level aligns the attack to the appropriate DDoS type. This approach is validated using the CIC-DDoS2019 dataset, and the time, accuracy score, and precision are used as the model performance metrics. Compared to the existing machine learning (ML) approaches, the proposed architecture reveals substantial improvements in both binary and multiclass classification of application-layer DDoS attacks.

An Intelligent Model for DDoS Attack Detection and Flash Event Management

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are the foremost security concerns on the Internet. DDoS attacks and a similar occurrence called Flash Event (FE) signify anomalies in the normal network traffic, requiring intelligent interventions. This study presents the design and implementation of an intelligent model for the detection of application-layer DDoS attacks and the prevention of service degradations during FE. A Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier was used for detecting DDoS attacks on application servers. The FE management system consists of asynchronous processing of requests on a First-In, First-Out (FIFO) basis. A demo application was set up wherein HTTP flood attack was launched and a Flash Event was simulated. The experimental results clearly show that the MLP classifier in comparison with other machine learning classifiers performs best in terms of speed and accuracy. Also, the evaluation of the FE management system shows a great reduction in service degradation. This reflects that the designed model is capable of averting service unavailability on the web.

Deep learning model for distributed denial of service (DDoS) detection

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is one of the serious threats in the domain of cybersecurity where it affects the availability of online services by disrupting access to its legitimate users. The consequences of such attacks could be millions of dollars in worth since all of the online services are relying on high availability. The magnitude of DDoS attacks is ever increasing as attackers are smart enough to innovate their attacking strategies to expose vulnerabilities in the intrusion detection models or mitigation mechanisms. The history of DDoS attacks reflects that network and transport layers of the OSI model were the initial target of the attackers, but the recent history from the cybersecurity domain proves that the attacking momentum has shifted toward the application layer of the OSI model which presents a high degree of difficulty distinguishing the attack and benign traffics that make the combat against application-layer DDoS attack a sophisticated task. Striding for high accuracy with high DDoS classification recall is key for any DDoS detection mechanism to keep the reliability and trustworthiness of such a system. In this paper, a deep learning approach for application-layer DDoS detection is proposed by using an autoencoder to perform the feature selection and Deep neural networks to perform the attack classification. A popular benchmark dataset CIC DoS 2017 is selected by extracting the most appealing features from the packet flows. The proposed model has achieved an accuracy of 99.83% with a detection rate of 99.84% while maintaining the false-negative rate of 0.17%, which has the heights accuracy rate among the literature reviewed so far.

WEB DDoS Attack Detection Method Based on Semisupervised Learning

Since the services on the Internet are becoming increasingly abundant, all walks of life are inextricably linked with the Internet. Simultaneously, the Internet’s WEB attacks have never stopped. Relative to other common WEB attacks, WEB DDoS (distributed denial of service) will cause serious damage to the availability of the target network or system resources in a short period of time. At present, most researches are centered around machine learning-related DDoS attack detection algorithms. According to previous studies, unsupervised methods generally have a high false positive rate, while supervisory methods cannot handle large amount of network traffic data, and the performance is often limited by noise and irrelevant data. Therefore, this paper proposes a semisupervised learning detection model combining spectral clustering and random forest to detect the DDoS attack of the WEB application layer and compares it with other existing detection schemes to verify the semisupervised learning model proposed in this paper. While ensuring a low false positive rate, there is a certain improvement in the detection rate, which is more suitable for the WEB application layer DDoS attack detection.

Real-Time DDoS Attack Detection System Using Big Data Approach

Currently, the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack has become rampant, and shows up in various shapes and patterns, therefore it is not easy to detect and solve with previous solutions. Classification algorithms have been used in many studies and have aimed to detect and solve the DDoS attack. DDoS attacks are performed easily by using the weaknesses of networks and by generating requests for services for software. Real-time detection of DDoS attacks is difficult to detect and mitigate, but this solution holds significant value as these attacks can cause big issues. This paper addresses the prediction of application layer DDoS attacks in real-time with different machine learning models. We applied the two machine learning approaches Random Forest (RF) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) through the Scikit ML library and big data framework Spark ML library for the detection of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. In addition to the detection of DoS attacks, we optimized the performance of the models by minimizing the prediction time as compared with other existing approaches using big data framework (Spark ML). We achieved a mean accuracy of 99.5% of the models both with and without big data approaches. However, in training and testing time, the big data approach outperforms the non-big data approach due to that the Spark computations in memory are in a distributed manner. The minimum average training and testing time in minutes was 14.08 and 0.04, respectively. Using a big data tool (Apache Spark), the maximum intermediate training and testing time in minutes was 34.11 and 0.46, respectively, using a non-big data approach. We also achieved these results using the big data approach. We can detect an attack in real-time in few milliseconds.

SDN-Based Architecture for Transport and Application Layer DDoS Attack Detection by Using Machine and Deep Learning

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks represent the most common and critical attacks targeting conventional and new generation networks, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and fifth-generation (5G) communication networks. In recent years, DDoS attacks have become not only massive but also sophisticated. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology has demonstrated effectiveness in counter-measuring complex attacks since it provides flexibility on global network monitoring and inline network configuration. Although several works have proposed to detect DDoS attacks, most of them did not use up-to-date datasets that contain the newest threats. Furthermore, only a few previous works assessed their solutions using simulated scenarios, easing the migration to production networks. This document presents the implementation of a modular and flexible SDN-based architecture to detect transport and application layer DDoS attacks using multiple Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models. Exploring diverse ML/DL methods allowed us to resolve which methods perform better under different attack types and conditions. We tested the ML/DL models using two up-to-date security datasets, namely CICDoS2017 and CICDDoS2019 datasets, and they showed accuracy above 99% on classifying unseen traffic (testing set). We also deployed a simulated environment using the network emulator Mininet and the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) SDN controller. In this experimental setup, we demonstrated high detection rates, above 98% for transport DDoS attacks and up to 95% for application-layer DDoS attacks.

Detecting Internet of Things attacks using distributed deep learning

The reliability of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices is heavily dependent on the security model employed to protect user data and prevent devices from engaging in malicious activity. Existing approaches for detecting phishing, distributed denial of service (DDoS), and Botnet attacks often focus on either the device or the back-end. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based distributed deep learning framework for phishing and Botnet attack detection and mitigation. The model comprises two key security mechanisms working cooperatively, namely: (1) a Distributed Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) model embedded as an IoT device micro-security add-on for detecting phishing and application layer DDoS attacks; and (2) a cloud-based temporal Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network model hosted on the back-end for detecting Botnet attacks, and ingest CNN embeddings to detect distributed phishing attacks across multiple IoT devices. The distributed CNN model, embedded into a ML engine in the client's IoT device, allows us to detect and defend the IoT device from phishing attacks at the point of origin. We create a dataset consisting of both phishing and non-phishing URLs to train the proposed CNN add-on security model, and select the N_BaIoT dataset for training the back-end LSTM model. The joint training method minimizes communication and resource requirements for attack detection, and maximizes the usefulness of extracted features. In addition, an aggregation of schemes allows the automatic fusion of multiple requests to improve the overall performance of the system. Our experiments show that the IoT micro-security add-on running the proposed CNN model is capable of detecting phishing attacks with an accuracy of 94.3% and a F-1 score of 93.58%. Using the back-end LSTM model, the model detects Botnet attacks with an accuracy of 94.80% using all malicious data points in the used dataset. Thus, the findings demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of detecting attacks, both at device and at the back-end level, in a distributed fashion.

Slow denial-of-service attacks on software defined networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a network paradigm that decouples the network’s control plane, delegated to the SDN controller, from the data plane, delegated to SDN switches.For increased efficiency, SDN switches use a high-performance Ternary Content-Addressable memory (TCAM) to install rules. However, due to the TCAM’s high cost and power consumption, switches have a limited amount of TCAM memory. Consequently, a limited number of rules can be installed. This limitation has been exploited to carry out Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, such as Saturation attacks, that generate large amounts of traffic. Inspired by slow application layer DDoS attacks, this paper presents and investigates DDoS attacks on SDN that do not require large amounts of traffic, thus bypassing existing defenses that are triggered by traffic volume.In particular, we offer two slow attacks on SDN. The first attack, called Slow TCAM Exhaustion attack (Slow-TCAM), is able to consume all SDN switch’s TCAM memory by forcing the installation of new forwarding rules and maintaining them indeterminately active, thus disallowing new rules to be installed to serve legitimate clients.The second attack, called Slow Saturation attack, combines Slow-TCAM attack with a lower rate instance of the Saturation attack. A Slow Saturation attack is capable of denying service using a fraction of the traffic of typical Saturation attacks. Moreover, the Slow Saturation attack can also impact installed legitimate rules, thus causing a greater impact than the Slow-TCAM attack. In addition, it also affects the availability of other network’s components, e.g., switches, even the ones not being directly targeted by the attack, as has been proven by our experiments. We propose a number of variations of these attacks and demonstrate their effectiveness by means of an extensive experimental evaluation. The Slow-TCAM is able to deny service to legitimate clients requiring only 38 s and sending less than 40 packets per second without abruptly changing network resources, such as CPU and memory. Moreover, besides denying service as a Slow-TCAM attack, the Slow Saturation attack can also disrupt multiple SDN switches (not only the targeted ones) by sending a lower-rate traffic when compared to current known Saturation attacks.

DeepDetect: Detection of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Using Deep Learning

Abstract At the advent of advanced wireless technology and contemporary computing paradigms, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Web-based services have not only increased exponentially in number, but also in the degree of sophistication; hence the need for detecting these attacks within the ocean of communication packets is extremely important. DDoS attacks were initially projected toward the network and transport layers. Over the years, attackers have shifted their offensive strategies toward the application layer. The application layer attacks are potentially more detrimental and stealthier because of the attack traffic and the benign traffic flows being indistinguishable. The distributed nature of these attacks is difficult to combat as they may affect tangible computing resources apart from network bandwidth consumption. In addition, smart devices connected to the Internet can be infected and used as botnets to launch DDoS attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network-based detection mechanism that uses feed-forward back-propagation for accurately discovering multiple application layer DDoS attacks. The proposed neural network architecture can identify and use the most relevant high level features of packet flows with an accuracy of 98% on the state-of-the-art dataset containing various forms of DDoS attacks.

DDoS Attacks at the Application Layer: Challenges and Research Perspectives for Safeguarding Web Applications

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are some of the most devastating attacks against Web applications. A large number of these attacks aim to exhaust the network bandwidth of the server, and are called network layer DDoS attacks. They are volumetric attacks and rely on a large volume of network layer packets to throttle the bandwidth. However, as time passed, network infrastructure became more robust and defenses against network layer attacks also became more advanced. Recently, DDoS attacks have started targeting the application layer. Unlike network layer attacks, these attacks can be carried out with a relatively low attack volume. They also utilize legitimate application layer requests, which makes it difficult for existing defense mechanisms to detect them. These attacks target a wide variety of resources at the application layer and can bring a server down much faster, and with much more stealth, than network layer DDoS attacks. Over the past decade, research on application layer DDoS attacks has focused on a few classes of these attacks. This paper attempts to explore the entire spectrum of application layer DDoS attacks using critical features that aid in understanding how these attacks can be executed. defense mechanisms against the different classes of attacks are also discussed with special emphasis on the features that aid in the detection of different classes of attacks. Such a discussion is expected to help researchers understand why a particular group of features are useful in detecting a particular class of attacks.

Application Layer Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Defense Techniques : A review

Currently distributed denial of service (DDoS) is the most sever attack that effect on the internet convenience. The main goal of these attacks is to prevent normal users from accessing the internet services such as web servers. However the more challenge and difficult types to detect is application layer DDoS attacks because of using legitimate client to create connection with victims. In this paper we give a review on application layer DDoS attacks defense or detection mechanisms. Furthermore, we summarize several experimental approaches on detection techniques of application layer DDoS attacks. The main goal of this paper is to get a clear view and detailed summary of the recent algorithms, methods and techniques presented to tackle these serious types of attacks.

Detection and differentiation of application layer DDoS attack from flash events using fuzzy‐GA computation

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are serious threats in the data center application, mainly affecting the web server. Even though there are various techniques to detect and mitigate such attacks so far they fail to meet in the case of application layer attack and Flash Events (FE). In the paper, we aim at detecting application layer DDoS attacks and distinguish it from FE. We have considered a DDoS attack model and selected the parameters in the incoming packets that correspond in causing the attack. Based on the attack model we have analysed the statistical parameters of the incoming packets such as inter-arrival time, the probability of uniqueness of an IP address in given time frame and the unavailability of HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) GET acknowledgment bit in the header field. These parameters are the input to the Fuzzy classification model. We have used Genetic Algorithm (GA) to provide an optimised value range for the input parameters. The optimised values are now applied to Fuzzy logic to identify whether the web accessing clients shows the behavior of attack, normal or FE. The experimental results show that Fuzzy-GA model provides an accuracy of 98.4% in detecting DDoS attack and 97.3% in detecting FE..

Securing the cloud-assisted smart grid

Rapid elasticity, ubiquitous network access, and highly-reliable services are some of the desirable features of cloud computing that are attractive for building cloud-assisted data-intensive Smart Grid (SG) applications. However, the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks represent a serious threat to the cloud-assisted SG applications. To mitigate the risk related to the DDoS threat, we propose an SG-relevant Hierarchical Hybrid Cloud-Extension Concept (HHCEC) along with a DDoS attack defense mechanism, termed as Port Hopping Spread Spectrum (PHSS). HHCEC is a cloud-assisted architecture designed to meet scalability and security requirements of the SG applications in the cloud. To prevent transport or application-layer DDoS attacks on HHCEC, PHSS switches the open port of server as a function of time and a secret shared between authorized clients and server, and thus efficiently dropping packets with closed port number. In addition, PHSS spreads the data packets over all the servers versus a single server to provide a robust protection against volume-based DDoS attacks that would affect some of the servers. This packet spreading approach enables PHSS to instantiate replica servers to take over the attacked servers without blocking the whole traffic by utilizing the rapid-elasticity characteristic of the cloud. Moreover, PHSS leverages a shuffling-based containment mechanism in order to quarantine malicious clients in a notably short time. Accordingly, the effect of a DDoS attack based on the compromised secret of the malicious clients is minimized. We evaluate our approach by building a proof-of-concept prototype using Amazon’s EC2 and the PlanetLab test-bed. In a DDoS attack scenario, the proposed approach obtains a significant availability enhancement of > 38% that highlight its efficiency in comparison to existing approaches. The results also indicate negligible overhead for the proposed approach compared to the plain system i.e., no additional latency and less than 0.01% throughput degradation.