A Distributed Denial of Service Attack Detection System using Long Short Term Memory with Singular Value Decomposition

Abstract

The increase in online activity during the COVID 19 pandemic has generated a surge in network traffic capable of expanding the scope of DDoS attacks. Cyber criminals can now afford to launch massive DDoS attacks capable of degrading the performances of conventional machine learning based IDS models. Hence, there is an urgent need for an effective DDoS attack detective model with the capacity to handle large magnitude of DDoS attack traffic. This study proposes a deep learning based DDoS attack detection system using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM). The proposed model was evaluated on UNSW-NB15 and NSL-KDD intrusion datasets, whereby twenty-three (23) and twenty (20) attack features were extracted from UNSW-NB15 and NSL-KDD, respectively using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The results from the proposed model show significant improvement when compared with results from some conventional machine learning techniques such as Naïve Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) with accuracies of 94.28% and 90.59% on both datasets, respectively. Furthermore, comparative analysis of LSTM with other deep learning results reported in literature justified the choice of LSTM among its deep learning peers in detecting DDoS attacks over a network.