A novel optimization-driven deep learning framework for the detection of DDoS attacks

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is one of the most hazardous assaults in cloud computing or networking. By depleting resources, this attack renders the services unavailable to end users and leads to significant financial and reputational damage. Hence, identifying such threats is crucial to minimize revenue loss, market share, and productivity loss and enhance the brand reputation. In this study, we implemented an effective intrusion detection system using deep learning approach. The suggested framework includes three phases: Data pre-processing, Data balancing, and Classification. First, we prepare the valid data, which is helpful for further processing. Then, we balance the given pre-processed data by Conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN), and as a result, we can minimize the bias towards the majority classes. Finally, we distinguish whether the traffic is attack or benign using a stacked sparse denoising autoencoder (SSDAE) with a firefly-black widow (FA-BW) hybrid optimization algorithm. All these experiments are validated through the CICDDoS2019 dataset and compared with well-received techniques. From these findings, we observed that the proposed strategy detects DDoS attacks significantly more accurately than other approaches. Based on our findings, this study highlights the crucial role played by advanced deep learning techniques and hybrid optimization algorithms in strengthening cybersecurity against DDoS attacks.