Detection of Application-Layer DDoS Attacks Produced by Various Freely Accessible Toolkits Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a growing threat to online services, and various methods have been developed to detect them. However, past research has mainly focused on identifying attack patterns and types, without specifically addressing the role of freely available DDoS attack tools in the escalation of these attacks. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the impact of the easy availability of DDoS attack tools on the frequency and severity of attacks. In this paper, a machine learning solution to detect DDoS attacks is proposed, which employs a feature selection technique to enhance its speed and efficiency, resulting in a substantial reduction in the feature subset. The provided evaluation metrics demonstrate that the model has a high accuracy level of 99.9%, a precision score of 96%, a recall score of 98%, and an F1 score of 97%. Moreover, the examination found that by utilizing a deliberate approach for feature selection, our model's efficacy was massively raised.