Detection and Localization of DDoS Attack During Inter-Slice Handover in 5G Network Slicing

Network slicing plays a crucial role in supporting Fifth Generation (5G) mobile network, which is designed to efficiently accommodate a diverse range of services with varying service level requirements. In this work, our efforts are largely aimed at exposing security flaws in 5G network slicing from a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack perspective. Time consuming authentication process during the inter-slice handover procedure is exploited to launch a DDoS attack. To address this issue, we offer novel attack detection and localization algorithms. We have compared results for various combinations of average waiting time and average switching rate to detect the attack and localize compromised user equipments. As per experimentation results, our approach resulted in an accuracy of 91% for detecting an attack and 96% for identifying compromised users.