A Recurrent Neural Network based Method for Low-Rate DDoS Attack Detection in SDN

Software-Defined Network (SDN) is a new networking paradigm that adopts centralized control logic and provides more control to the network operators over the network infrastructure to meet future network requirements. SDN controller known as operation system, which is responsible for running network applications and maintaining the different network services and functionalities. Despite all its great capabilities, SDN is facing different security threats due to its various architectural entities and centralized nature. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a promptly growing attack and becomes a major threat for the SDN. To date, most of the studies focus on detecting high-rate DDoS attacks at the control layer of SDN and low-rate DDoS attacks are high concealed because they are difficult to detect. Furthermore, the existing methods are useful for the detection of high-rate DDoS, so need to focus on low-rate DDoS attacks separately. Hence, the use of machine learning algorithms is growing for the detection of low-rate DDoS attacks in the SDN, but they achieved low accuracy against this attack. To improve the detection accuracy, this paper first describes the attack's mechanism and then proposes a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based method. The extracted features from the flow rules are used by the RNN for the detection of low-rate attacks. The experimental results show that the proposed method intelligently detects the attack, and its detection accuracy reaches 98.59%. The proposed method achieves good detection accuracy as compared to existing studies.