Explainable AI-Based DDOS Attack Identification Method for IoT Networks

Kalutharage, Chathuranga Sampath; Liu, Xiaodong; Chrysoulas, Christos; Pitropakis, Nikolaos; Papadopoulos, Pavlos

Abstract

The modern digitized world is mainly dependent on online services. The availability of online systems continues to be seriously challenged by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The challenge in mitigating attacks is not limited to identifying DDoS attacks when they happen, but also identifying the streams of attacks. However, existing attack detection methods cannot accurately and efficiently detect DDoS attacks. To this end, we propose an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)-based novel method to identify DDoS attacks. This method detects abnormal behaviours of network traffic flows by analysing the traffic at the network layer. Moreover, it chooses the most influential features for each anomalous instance with influence weight and then sets a threshold value for each feature. Hence, this DDoS attack detection method defines security policies based on each feature threshold value for application-layer-based, volumetric-based, and transport control protocol (TCP) state-exhaustion-based features. Since the proposed method is based on layer three traffic, it can identify DDoS attacks on both Internet of Things (IoT) and traditional networks. Extensive experiments were performed on the University of Sannio, Benevento Instrution Detection System (USB-IDS) dataset, which consists of different types of DDoS attacks to test the performance of the proposed solution. The results of the comparison show that the proposed method provides greater detection accuracy and attack certainty than the state-of-the-art methods.

Citation

Kalutharage, C. S., Liu, X., Chrysoulas, C., Pitropakis, N., & Papadopoulos, P. (2023). Explainable AI-Based DDOS Attack Identification Method for IoT Networks. Computers, 12(2), Article 32. https://doi.org/10.3390/computers12020032

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 1, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Feb 3, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Feb 13, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 13, 2023
• Journal: Computers
• Electronic ISSN: 2073-431X
• Publisher: MDPI
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 2
• Article Number: 32
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/computers12020032
• Keywords: explainable AI, DDoS attack, IoT network, feature influence, anomaly detection, supervised learning