Windower: Feature Extraction for Real-Time DDoS Detection Using Machine Learning

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are an ever-increasing type of security incident on modern computer networks. To tackle the issue, we propose Windower, a feature-extraction method for real-time network-based intrusion (particularly DDoS) detection. Our stream data mining module employs a sliding window principle to compute statistical information directly from network packets. Furthermore, we summarize several such windows and compute inter-window statistics to increase detection reliability. Summarized statistics are then fed into an ML-based attack discriminator. If an attack is recognized, we drop the consequent attacking source’s traffic using simple ACL rules. The experimental results evaluated on several datasets indicate the ability to reliably detect an ongoing attack within the first six seconds of its start and mitigate 99% of flood and 92% of slow attacks while maintaining false positives below 1%. In contrast to state-of-the-art, our approach provides greater flexibility by achieving high detection performance and low resources as flow-based systems while offering prompt attack detection known from packet-based solutions. Windower thus brings an appealing trade-off between attack detection performance, detection delay, and computing resources suitable for real-world deployments.