Hybrid Approach to Classification of DDoS Attacks on a Computer Network Infrastructure

Abstract

The advancement in technology, its ease of use, and the competitive nature of its deployment in business operations have led to the wide spread of networking systems globally, and Ghana is not an exception. Most business operations and even personal activities are now conducted online leading to increased network connectivity, access to networked resources, and the corresponding cyber-attacks on these network systems. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) is one of the sophisticated attacks in the cyberspace. In DDOs, the attacker floods the network with massive and unsolicited traffic, causing the network infrastructure to exhaust all its resources in responding to the attacker’s request, thereby denying access to legitimate users of such resources. In this study, we designed and implemented a hybrid deep learning model (CRNN-Infusion) for detection and classification of DDoS attacks. Our model utilized the CNN, and RNN models, with the CICDDoS2019 dataset obtained from the Canadian Institute of Cybersecurity (CIC) for its training, with Random Search Hyperparameter Tuning (RSHT) and Feature Selection (FS) techniques for model efficiency and dimensionality reduction. Cybersecurity (CIC) for the model’s training, with Random Search Hyperparameter Tuning (RSHT) and FS techniques for model efficiency and dimensionality reduction. The results showed that, our proposed model is a better classifier for DDoS attacks compared to other deep learning (DL) models trained on the same dataset. With the highest accuracy of 98.92%, hybrid deep learning models are suitable for detecting and classifying DDoS attacks on network infrastructures. The findings point out that, with the appropriate choice of feature selection and hyperparameter tuning techniques, hybrid deep learning models perform optimally, with 98.92% accuracy, 99.02% precision, 98.92% recall, and 98.93% F1 score for our proposed model.