A Deep CNN Ensemble Framework for Efficient DDoS Attack Detection in Software Defined Networks

Abstract

As novel technologies continue to reshape the digital era, cyberattacks are also increasingly becoming more commonplace and sophisticated. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are, perhaps, the most prevalent and exponentially-growing attack, targeting the varied and emerging computational network infrastructures across the globe. This necessitates the design of an efficient and early detection of large-scale sophisticated DDoS attacks. Software defined networks (SDN) point to a promising solution, as a network paradigm which decouples the centralized control intelligence from the forwarding logic. In this work, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) ensemble framework for efficient DDoS attack detection in SDNs is proposed. The proposed framework is evaluated on a current state-of-the-art Flow-based dataset under established benchmarks. Improved accuracy is demonstrated against existing related detection approaches.