HTTP Flood Attack Detection using Ontology

Abstract

The use of web applications by the users over the Internet is increasing day by day. Analyzing the increasing demand, many organizations are providing their services through web applications. Number of users and web applications are increasing continuously. Moreover, the malicious traffic is also increasing with the same rate. Therefore, there is a need to secure web servers and applications. Web servers and applications are suffering from Flooding attacks from network to the application layer. Many solutions are available for flooding attacks at the network and transport layer. However, very few solutions are available for flooding attacks at application layer due to complexity in detecting the behavior of attack. This paper proposes the HTTP Request ontology for the efficient detection of HTTP Flood attack. The proposed ontology is useful for the development of semantic rules for attack detection, which produces a higher detection rate as compared to the current state of the art systems.