GLD-Net: Deep Learning to Detect DDoS Attack via Topological and Traffic Feature Fusion

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are the most common means of cyberattacks against infrastructure, and detection is the first step in combating them. The current DDoS detection mainly uses the improvement or fusion of machine learning and deep learning methods to improve classification performance. However, most classifiers are trained with statistical flow features as input, ignoring topological connection changes. This one-sidedness affects the detection accuracy and cannot provide a basis for the distribution of attack sources for defense deployment. In this study, we propose a topological and flow feature-based deep learning method (GLD-Net), which simultaneously extracts flow and topological features from time-series flow data and exploits graph attention network (GAT) to mine correlations between non-Euclidean features to fuse flow and topological features. The long short-term memory (LSTM) network connected behind GAT obtains the node neighborhood relationship, and the fully connected layer is utilized to achieve feature dimension reduction and traffic type mapping. Experiments on the NSL-KDD2009 and CIC-IDS2017 datasets show that the detection accuracy of the GLD-Net method for two classifications (normal and DDoS flow) and three classifications (normal, fast DDoS flow, and slow DDoS flow) reaches 0.993 and 0.942, respectively. Compared with the existing DDoS attack detection methods, its average improvement is 0.11 and 0.081, respectively. In addition, the correlation coefficient between the detection accuracy of attack flow and the four source distribution indicators ranges from 0.7 to 0.83, which lays a foundation for the inference of attack source distribution. Notably, we are the first to fuse topology and flow features and achieve high-performance DDoS attack intrusion detection through graph-style neural networks. This study has important implications for related research and development of network security systems in other fields.