SSK-DDoS: distributed stream processing framework based classification system for DDoS attacks

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) is an immense threat for Internet based-applications and their resources. It immediately floods the victim system by transmitting a large number of network packets, and due to this, the victim system resources become unavailable for legitimate users. Therefore, this attack is claimed to be a dangerous attack for Internet-based applications and their resources. Several security approaches have been proposed in the literature to protect Internet-based applications from this type of threat. However, the frequency and strength of DDoS attacks are increasing day-by-day. Further, most of the traditional and distributed processing frameworks-based DDoS attack detection systems analyzed network flows in offline batch processing. Hence, they failed to classify network flows in real-time. This paper proposes a novel Spark Streaming and Kafka-based distributed classification system, named by SSK-DDoS, for classifying different types of DDoS attacks and legitimate network flows. This classification approach is implemented using a distributed Spark MLlib machine learning algorithms on a Hadoop cluster and deployed on the Spark streaming platform to classify streams in real-time. The incoming streams consume by Kafka’s topic to perform preprocessing tasks such as extracting and formulating features for classifying them into seven groups: Benign, DDoS-DNS, DDoS-LDAP, DDoS-MSSQL, DDoS-NetBIOS, DDoS-UDP, and DDoS-SYN. Further, the SSK-DDoS classification system stores formulated features with their predicted class into the HDFS that will help to retrain the distributed classification approach using a new set of samples. The proposed SSK-DDoS classification system has been validated using the recent CICDDoS2019 dataset. The results show that the proposed SSK-DDoS efficiently classified network flows into seven classes and stored formulated features with the predicted value of each incoming network flow into HDFS.