Deep learning techniques for DDoS attack detection: Concepts, analyses, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are increasingly becoming a major threat in the field of cybersecurity. They overwhelm target servers by sending large-scale requests from multiple locations, causing the servers to become unresponsive. The distributed nature of DDoS attacks also makes detection and defense even more challenging. As the damage caused by such attacks grows, the development of efficient detection and mitigation mechanisms has become an urgent priority. While traditional machine learning methods are useful, they still require manual feature extraction, which not only involves significant human intervention, but also is time-consuming. In contrast, deep learning offers an automated approach to feature extraction and can learn more abstract patterns, which leads to improved detection performance. Therefore, this paper reviews and analyzes existing deep learning methods for DDoS attack detection. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the various types of DDoS attacks and explore different deep learning models employed for attack detection. Additionally, we explore techniques such as federated learning that can be integrated with deep learning, and analyze their related literature in DDoS attack detection. Finally, we specify future research directions on DDoS attack detection using deep learning.