DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, is an attack in which traffic from different sources floods a victim, resulting in service interruption. There are many types of DDoS attacks, falling under three general categories: application-level, protocol, and volumetric attacks. Much of the DDoS defense today is manual. Certain IP addresses or domains are identified and then blocked. As DDoS bots become more sophisticated, such approaches are becoming outdated. Machine learning offers a promising automated solution.
The dataset we will be working with is a subsampling of the CSE-CIC-IDS2018, CICIDS2017, and CIC DoS datasets (2017). It consists of 80% benign and 20% DDoS traffic, in order to represent a more realistic ratio of normal-to-DDoS traffic.