Abstract
•Propose a novel sketch to fuse network traffic and recover anomalous sources.•Design a multi-dimensional change-point method for flooding attack detection.•Support self-adaptive and protocol independent detection.•Evaluate method efficiency, accuracy and adaptability with real-world datasets.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) flooding attacks are one of the typical attacks over the Internet. They aim to prevent normal users from accessing specific network resources. How to detect DDoS flooding attacks arises a significant and timely research topic. However, with the continuous increase of network scale, the continuous growth of network traffic brings great challenges to the detection of DDoS flooding attacks. Incomplete network traffic collection or non-real-time processing of big-volume network traffic will seriously affect the accuracy and efficiency of attack detection. Recently, sketch data structures are widely applied in high-speed networks to compress and fuse network traffic. But sketches suffer from a reversibility problem that it is difficult to reconstruct a set of keys that exhibit abnormal behavior due to the irreversibility of hash functions. In order to address the above challenges, in this paper, we first design a novel Chinese Remainder Theorem based Reversible Sketch (CRT-RS). CRT-RS is not only capable of compressing and fusing big-volume network traffic but also has the ability of reversely discovering the anomalous keys (e.g., the sources of malicious or unwanted traffic). Then, based on traffic records generated by CRT-RS, we propose a Modified Multi-chart Cumulative Sum (MM-CUSUM) algorithm that supports self-adaptive and protocol independent detection to detect DDoS flooding attacks. The performance of the proposed detection method is experimentally examined by two open source datasets. The experimental results show that the method can detect DDoS flooding attacks with efficiency, accuracy, adaptability, and protocol independability. Moreover, by comparing with other attack detection methods using sketch techniques, our method has quantifiable lower computation complexity when recovering the anomalous source addresses, which is the most important merit of the developed method.