Adversarial Debiasing of Machine Learning Models for Enhanced Network Security against DDoS Attacks

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service attacks are a growing threat to network infrastructure, and new techniques, including the use of generative AI, make them harder to detect. Traditional detection systems, such as rule based firewalls, often fail to identify these evolving attack patterns. In this study, we propose a new method for detecting DDoS attacks by combining synthetic data generation using Generative Adversarial Networks with a Random Forest classifier. The GAN generated data showed 80.3 percent cosine similarity to real traffic, which helped the model learn underlying traffic patterns more effectively. To address imbalances in the data, especially in packet related features, we applied adversarial debiasing. This reduced the model's sensitivity to skewed distributions in variables such as forward and backward packet counts and total byte lengths. Our results show that models trained on a mix of synthetic and real data achieved significantly better performance: 99.98 percent accuracy on benchmark data and a 22.60 percent improvement when tested on previously unseen synthetic traffic. This suggests that the method can generalize well across different traffic scenarios and adapt quickly to new types of attacks. The proposed approach not only improves DDoS detection but also provides a scalable foundation for security models that account for bias and benefit from data augmentation. Our findings show that combining GANs with adversarial debiasing can lead to more robust and effective DDoS mitigation, supporting the further development of machine learning based cyber security.