Intrusion detection system for detecting distributed denial of service attacks using machine learning algorithms

Abstract

Today, the creation of more effective intrusion detection system (IDS) has become crucial due to the rise in computer malware. Ensuring the availability of the system is an important component of information security and the most important requirement of any network. Recently the machine learning algorithm (ML) has been used to improve intrusion detection over the network. It is currently necessary to release an updated version of these systems. The presented work aimed to build a reliable and accurate IDS based on ML to classify and prevent distributed denial of service attacks to protect any system working on the network from temporary or complete system failure. We presented five ML models to create the proposed distributed denial-of-services attack (DDoS)-IDS, including (decision tree, random forest, logistic regression, support vector machine, and multi-layer neural network) which were trained and evaluated using the CIC-IDS-2018 dataset. Furthermore, principal component analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the dimensionality of the dataset. According to the classification results, the proposed multi-layer neural network model reached optimal performance for detecting DDoS attacks and achieved classification accuracy at 99.9992%.