Distinguishing Flooding Distributed Denial of Service from Flash Crowds Using Four Data Mining Approaches

Bin Kong1, 2, Kun Yang4, 5, Degang Sun4, 5, Meimei Li3, 4, 5 and Zhixin Shi4, 5

  1. School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University
    Beijing, China
    pingpangfan@163.com
  2. National Secrecy Science and Technology Evaluation Center
    Beijing, China
    pingpangfan@163.com
  3. School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University
    Beijing, China
    limeimei@iie.ac.cn
  4. Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences
    Beijing, China
    {yangkun,sundegang,limeimei,shizhixin@iie.ac.cn}
  5. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
    Beijing, China
    {yangkun,sundegang,limeimei,shizhixin@iie.ac.cn}

Abstract

Flooding Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can cause significant damage to Internet. These attacks have many similarities to Flash Crowds (FCs) and are always difficult to distinguish. To solve this issue, this paper first divides existing methods into two categories to clarify existing researches. Moreover, after conducting an extensive analysis, a new feature set is concluded to profile DDoS and FC. Along with this feature set, this paper proposes a new method that employs Data Mining approaches to discriminate between DDoS attacks and FCs. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed method based on two realworld datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method could achieve a high accuracy (more than 98%). Additionally, compared with a traditional entropy method, the proposed method still demonstrates better performance.

Key words

Flooding DDoS, Flash Crowds, Data Mining, Entropy

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS161230032K

Publication information

Volume 14, Issue 3 (September 2017)
Advances in Information Technology, Distributed and Model Driven Systems
Year of Publication: 2017
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium

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How to cite

Kong, B., Yang, K., Sun, D., Li, M., Shi, Z.: Distinguishing Flooding Distributed Denial of Service from Flash Crowds Using Four Data Mining Approaches. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 14, No. 3, 839–856. (2017), https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS161230032K