Identifying Hybrid DDoS Attacks in Deterministic Machine-to-Machine Networks on a Per-Deterministic-Flow Basis

The Deterministic Network (DetNet) is becoming a major feature for 5G and 6G networks to cope with the issue that conventional IT infrastructure cannot efficiently handle latency-sensitive data. The DetNet applies flow virtualization to satisfy time-critical flow requirements, but inevitably, DetNet flows and conventional flows interact/interfere with each other when sharing the same physical resources. This subsequently raises the hybrid DDoS security issue that high malicious traffic not only attacks the DetNet centralized controller itself but also attacks the links that DetNet flows pass through. Previous research focused on either the DDoS type of the centralized controller side or the link side. As DDoS attack techniques are evolving, Hybrid DDoS attacks can attack multiple targets (controllers or links) simultaneously, which are difficultly detected by previous DDoS detection methodologies. This study, therefore, proposes a Flow Differentiation Detector (FDD), a novel approach to detect Hybrid DDoS attacks. The FDD first applies a fuzzy-based mechanism, Target Link Selection, to determine the most valuable links for the DDoS link/server attacker and then statistically evaluates the traffic pattern flowing through these links. Furthermore, the contribution of this study is to deploy the FDD in the SDN controller OpenDayLight to implement a Hybrid DDoS attack detection system. The experimental results show that the FDD has superior detection accuracy (above 90%) than traditional methods under the situation of different ratios of Hybrid DDoS attacks and different types and scales of topology.