Detection of DDoS Attacks in Software Defined Networking Using Machine Learning Models

Abstract

The concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN) represents a modern approach to networking that separates the control plane from the data plane through network abstraction, resulting in a flexible, programmable and dynamic architecture compared to traditional networks. The separation of control and data planes has led to a high degree of network resilience, but has also given rise to new security risks, including the threat of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which pose a new challenge in the SDN environment. In this paper, the effectiveness of using machine learning algorithms to detect distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in software-defined networking (SDN) environments is investigated. Four algorithms, including Random Forest, Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, and XGBoost, were tested on the CICDDoS2019 dataset, with the timestamp feature dropped among others. Performance was assessed by measures of accuracy, recall, accuracy, and F1 score, with the Random Forest algorithm having the highest accuracy, at 68.9%. The results indicate that ML-based detection is a more accurate and effective method for identifying DDoS attacks in SDN, despite the computational requirements of non-parametric algorithms.