Detection of DDoS attacks using optimized traffic matrix

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have been increasing with the growth of computer and network infrastructures in Ubiquitous computing. DDoS attacks generating mass traffic deplete network bandwidth and/or system resources. It is therefore significant to detect DDoS attacks in their early stage. Our previous approach used a traffic matrix to detect DDoS attacks quickly and accurately. However, it could not find out to tune up parameters of the traffic matrix including (i) size of traffic matrix. (ii) time based window size, and (iii) a threshold value of variance from packets information with respect to various monitored environments and DDoS attacks. Moreover, the time based window size led to computational overheads when DDoS attacks did not occur. To cope with it, we propose an enhanced DDoS attacks detection approach by optimizing the parameters of the traffic matrix using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to maximize the detection rates. Furthermore, we improve the traffic matrix building operation by (i) reforming the hash function to decrease hash collisions and (ii) replacing the time based window size with a packet based window size to reduce the computational overheads. We perform experiments with DARPA 2000 LLDOS 1.0, LBL-PKT-4 of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and generated attack datasets. The experimental results show the feasibility of our approach in terms of detection accuracy and speed. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.