DDoS attacks detection on internet of things using unsupervised machine learning algorithms

The increase in the deployment of IoT networks has improved productivity of humans and organisations. However, IoT networks are increasingly becoming platforms for launching DDoS attacks due to inherent weaker security and resource-constrained nature of IoT devices. This paper focusses on detecting DDoS attack in IoT networks by classifying incoming network packets on the transport layer as either “Suspicious” or “Benign” using unsupervised machine learning algorithms. In this work, two deep learning algorithms and two clustering algorithms were independently trained for mitigating DDoS attacks. We lay emphasis on exploitation based DDOS attacks which include TCP SYN-Flood attacks and UDP-Lag attacks. We use Mirai, BASHLITE and CICDDoS2019 dataset in training the algorithms during the experimentation phase. The accuracy score and normalizedmutual-information score are used to quantify the classification performance of the four algorithms. Our results show that the autoencoder performed overall best with the highest accuracy across all the datasets.