DDoS Attacks Detection with Half Autoencoder-Stacked Deep Neural Network

Abstract

With the growth in services supplied over the internet, network infrastructure has become more exposed to cyber-attacks, particularly Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which can easily cause the disruption of services. The key factor for fighting against these attacks is the earlier separation and detection of the traffic in networks. In this paper, a novel approach, named Half Autoencoder-Stacked DNNs (HAE-SDNN) model, is proposed. We suggest using a Stacked Deep Neural Networks (SDNN) model. as a deep learning model, in order to detect DDoS attacks. Our approach allows feature selection from a preprocessed dataset using a Half AutoEncoder (HAE), resulting in a final set of important features. These features are subsequently used to train the DNNs that are stacked together by applying Softmax layer to combine their outputs. Experiments were performed on a benchmark cybersecurity dataset, named CICDDoS2017, containing various DDoS attack types. The experimental results demonstrate that the introduced model attained an overall accuracy rate of 99.95%. Moreover, the HAE-SDNN model outperformed existing models, highlighting its superiority in accurately classifying attacks.