Is There a DDoS?: System+Application Variable Monitoring to Ascertain the Attack Presence

The state of the art has numerous contributions which focus on combating the DDoS attacks. We argue that the mitigation methods are only useful if the victim service or the mitigation method can ascertain the presence of a DDoS attack. In many of the past solutions, the authors decide the presence of DDoS using quick and dirty checks. However, precise mechanisms are still needed so that the accurate decisions about DDoS mitigation can be made. In this work, we propose a method for detecting the presence of DDoS attacks using system variables available at the server or victim server operating system. To achieve this, we propose a machine learning based detection model in which there are three steps involved. In the first step, we monitored 14 different systems and application variables/ characteristics with and without a variety of DDoS attacks. In the second step, we trained machine learning model with monitored data of all the selected variables. In the final step, our approach uses the artificial neural network (ANN) and random forest (RF) based approaches to detect the presence of DDoS attacks. Our presence identification approach gives a detection accuracy of 88%-95% for massive attacks, 65%-77% for mixed traffic having a mixture of low-rate attack and benign requests, 58%-60% for flashcrowd, 76%-81% for mixed traffic having a mixture of massive attack and benign traffic and 58%-64% for low rate attacks with a detection time of 4-5 seconds.