Biblio

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are widely used by malicious actors to disrupt network infrastructures/services. A common attack is TCP SYN Flood that attempts to exhaust memory and processing resources. Typical mitigation mechanisms, i.e. SYN cookies require significant processing resources and generate large rates of backscatter traffic to block them. In this paper, we propose a detection and mitigation schema that focuses on generating and optimizing signature-based rules. To that end, network traffic is monitored and appropriate packet-level data are processed to form signatures i.e. unique combinations of packet field values. These are fed to machine learning models that classify them to malicious/benign. Malicious signatures corresponding to specific destinations identify potential victims. TCP traffic to victims is redirected to high-performance programmable XDPenabled firewalls that filter off ending traffic according to signatures classified as malicious. To enhance mitigation performance malicious signatures are subjected to a reduction process, formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. Minimization objectives are (i) the number of malicious signatures and (ii) collateral damage on benign traffic. We evaluate our approach in terms of detection accuracy and packet filtering performance employing traces from production environments and high rate generated attack traffic. We showcase that our approach achieves high detection accuracy, significantly reduces the number of filtering rules and outperforms the SYN cookies mechanism in high-speed traffic scenarios.

Software Defined Networks (SDNs) have gained prominence recently due to their flexible management and superior configuration functionality of the underlying network. SDNs, with OpenFlow as their primary implementation, allow for the use of a centralised controller to drive the decision making for all the supported devices in the network and manage traffic through routing table changes for incoming flows. In conventional networks, machine learning has been shown to detect malicious intrusion, and classify attacks such as DoS, user to root, and probe attacks. In this work, we extend the use of machine learning to improve traffic tolerance for SDNs. To achieve this, we extend the functionality of the controller to include a resilience framework, ReSDN, that incorporates machine learning to be able to distinguish DoS attacks, focussing on a neptune attack for our experiments. Our model is trained using the MIT KDD 1999 dataset. The system is developed as a module on top of the POX controller platform and evaluated using the Mininet simulator.