A hybrid machine learning approach for detecting unprecedented DDoS attacks

Service availability plays a vital role on computer networks, against which Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are an increasingly growing threat each year. Machine learning (ML) is a promising approach widely used for DDoS detection, which obtains satisfactory results for pre-known attacks. However, they are almost incapable of detecting unknown malicious traffic. This paper proposes a novel method combining both supervised and unsupervised algorithms. First, a clustering algorithm separates the anomalous traffic from the normal data using several flow-based features. Then, using certain statistical measures, a classification algorithm is used to label the clusters. Employing a big data processing framework, we evaluate the proposed method by training on the CICIDS2017 dataset and testing on a different set of attacks provided in the more up-to-date CICDDoS2019. The results demonstrate that the Positive Likelihood Ratio (LR+) of our method is approximately 198% higher than the ML classification algorithms.