Machine Learning-based Detection of HTTP DoS Attacks for Cloud Web Applications

Abstract

Recently, the number of cloud web applications is increasing owing to the accelerated migration of enterprises and public sector information systems to the cloud. Traditional network attacks on cloud web applications are characterized by Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, which consume network resources with a large number of packets. However, HTTP DoS attacks, which consume application resources, are also increasing recently; as such, developing security technologies to prevent them is necessary. In particular, since low-bandwidth HTTP DoS attacks do not consume network resources, they are difficult to identify using traditional security solutions that monitor network metrics. In this paper, we propose a new detection model for detecting HTTP DoS attacks on cloud web applications by collecting the application metrics of web servers and learning them using machine learning. We collected 18 types of application metrics from an Apache web server and used five machine learning and two deep learning models to train the collected data. Further, we confirmed the superiority of the application metrics-based machine learning model by collecting and training 6 additional network metrics and comparing their performance with the proposed models. Among HTTP DoS attacks, we injected the RUDY and HULK attacks, which are low- and high-bandwidth attacks, respectively. As a result of detecting these two attacks using the proposed model, we found out that the F1 scores of the application metrics-based machine learning model were about 0.3 and 0.1 higher than that of the network metrics-based model, respectively.