Eye-Net: A Low-Complexity Distributed Denial of Service Attack-Detection System Based on Multilayer Perceptron

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks disrupt service availability, leading to significant financial setbacks for individuals and businesses. This paper introduces Eye-Net, a deep learning-based system optimized for DDoS attack detection that combines feature selection, balancing methods, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and quantization-aware training (QAT) techniques. An Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) algorithm is initially applied to the dataset to identify the most distinctive features. Subsequently, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) balances the dataset by augmenting samples for under-represented classes. Two distinct MLP models are developed: one for the binary classification of flow packets as regular or DDoS traffic and another for identifying six specific DDoS attack types. We store MLP model weights at 8-bit precision by incorporating the quantization-aware training technique. This adjustment slashes memory use by a factor of four and reduces computational cost similarly, making Eye-Net suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Both models are rigorously trained and assessed using the CICDDoS2019 dataset. Test results reveal that Eye-Net excels, surpassing contemporary DDoS detection techniques in accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 Score. The multiclass model achieves an impressive accuracy of 96.47% with an error rate of 8.78%, while the binary model showcases an outstanding 99.99% accuracy, maintaining a negligible error rate of 0.02%.