Distributed Denial of Service Attack Detection and Prevention Using Pipit Fox-Attentional Deep Learning in Software-Defined Networking

The Software-Defined Network (SDN) remains the innovative model that assists in satisfying the new application requirements of future networks. However, destructive attacks, particularly Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, are aimed primarily at the SDN control panel, presenting a significant risk to network security. The traditional approaches for DDoS attack detection exhibit several limitations including interpretability challenges, overfitting problems, and false predictions. To mitigate these drawbacks, the research proposed a Pipit Flying Fox Optimized Deep Neural Network (PPF-DNN) and Intelligent Pipit Forage Optimized-Attentional Convolutional Neural Network (IPFO-ACNN) model. The channel attention is employed to enable the network to focus selectively on relevant information, improving the model’s sensitivity to subtle anomalies associated with DDoS attacks. By dynamically adjusting the attention weights across channels, the mechanism enhances the capability of the model to discriminate the normal network traffic and malicious patterns, which results in improved precision and reduced false positives. This approach harnesses the power of CNN to automatically extract hierarchical features from network data, enhancing the efficacy of the ACNN model in attack detection. IPFO and PPF algorithms integrate the unique strengths of bio-inspired algorithms, creating a synergistic approach for efficient model parameter tuning. In the case of Training Percentage (TP) 80, the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of the IPFO-ACNN model are evaluated as 98.87%, 99.24% and 97.91%, respectively. Similarly, the PPF-DNN model’s performance is assessed as 98.49%, 92.50% and 98.55%, which presents a promising avenue for bolstering network security infrastructure, ensuring more robust DDoS detection and mitigation capabilities in an increasingly complex cyber threat landscape.