Computer vision based distributed denial of service attack detection for resource-limited devices

Abstract

The growing adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) has rendered them a desirable target for cyber-attacks. One of the biggest threats to these systems is the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which is a botnet-based attack. The reason for the increasing usage of machine learning and deep learning-based intrusion detection systems in IoT network security is their ability to recognize DDoS attack. Recent studies, however, shows how susceptible IoT networks are to these kinds of attacks and detection accuracy can be greatly lowered. While a majority of studies has concentrated on DDoS attack detection for deep learning, little attention has been paid to computer vision, especially image-based artificial intelligence technologies like convolutional neural network (CNN). In this study, we use an image-based dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of CNN, an effective computer vision approach, for DDoS attack detection in IoT contexts. Owing to the small size of the selected dataset and in order to improve the CNN model’s detection efficiency, we implement various data augmentation techniques prior to the model’s training, including scaling, rotation, and vertical and horizontal flipping. Next, we introduce an efficient CNN-based method for detection of DDoS attacks in IoT settings. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that the statistical significance testing showed that there is a significance difference among the five models employed during the study, and the VGG19 which has higher accuracy (99.74%) and less computing cost (6020.80 s), which enables IoT devices to perform DDoS attack detection with cost-effectiveness.