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DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks consist of a large number of compromised computer systems that launch joint attacks at a targeted victim, such as a server, website, or other network equipment, simultaneously. DDoS has become a widespread and severe threat to the integrity of computer networks. DDoS can lead to system paralysis, making it difficult to troubleshoot. As a critical component of the creation of an integrated defensive system, it is essential to detect DDoS attacks as early as possible. With the popularization of artificial intelligence, more and more researchers have applied machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) to the detection of DDoS attacks and have achieved satisfactory accomplishments. The complexity and sophistication of DDoS attacks have continuously increased and evolved since the first DDoS attack was reported in 1996. Regarding the headways in this problem, a new type of DDoS attack, named adversarial DDoS attack, is investigated in this study. The generating adversarial DDoS traffic is carried out using a symmetric generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture called CycleGAN to demonstrate the severe impact of adversarial DDoS attacks. Experiment results reveal that the synthesized attack can easily penetrate ML-based detection systems, including RF (random forest), KNN (k-nearest neighbor), SVM (support vector machine), and naïve Bayes. These alarming results intimate the urgent need for countermeasures against adversarial DDoS attacks. We present a novel DDoS detection framework that incorporates GAN with a symmetrically built generator and discriminator defense system (SDGAN) to deal with these problems. Both symmetric discriminators are intended to simultaneously identify adversarial DDoS traffic. As demonstrated by the experimental results, the suggested SDGAN can be an effective solution against adversarial DDoS attacks. We train SDGAN on adversarial DDoS data generated by CycleGAN and compare it to four previous machine learning-based detection systems. SDGAN outperformed the other machine learning models, with a TPR (true positive rate) of 87.2%, proving its protection ability. Additionally, a more comprehensive test was undertaken to evaluate SDGAN's capacity to defend against unseen adversarial threats. SDGAN was evaluated using non-training data-generated adversarial traffic. SDGAN remained effective, with a TPR of around 70.9%, compared to RF's 9.4%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) has emerged as a serious and challenging threat to computer networks and information systems' security and integrity. Before any remedial measures can be implemented, DDoS assaults must first be detected. DDoS attacks can be identified and characterized with satisfactory achievement employing ML (Machine Learning) and DL (Deep Learning). However, new varieties of aggression arise as the technology for DDoS attacks keep evolving. This research explores the impact of a new incarnation of DDoS attack–adversarial DDoS attack. There are established works on ML-based DDoS detection and GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) based adversarial DDoS synthesis. We confirm these findings in our experiments. Experiments in this study involve the extension and application of the GAN, a machine learning framework with symmetric form having two contending neural networks. We synthesize adversarial DDoS attacks utilizing Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks featuring Gradient Penalty (GP-WGAN). Experiment results indicate that the synthesized traffic can traverse the detection systems such as k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Random Forest (RF) without being identified. This observation is a sobering and pessimistic wake-up call, implying that countermeasures to adversarial DDoS attacks are urgently needed. To this problem, we propose a novel DDoS detection framework featuring GAN with Dual Discriminators (GANDD). The additional discriminator is designed to identify adversary DDoS traffic. The proposed GANDD can be an effective solution to adversarial DDoS attacks, as evidenced by the experimental results. We use adversarial DDoS traffic synthesized by GP-WGAN to train GANDD and validate it alongside three other DL technologies: DNN (Deep Neural Network), LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) and GAN. GANDD outperformed the other DL models, demonstrating its protection with a TPR of 84.3%. A more sophisticated test was also conducted to examine GANDD's ability to handle unseen adversarial attacks. GANDD was evaluated with adversarial traffic not generated from its training data. GANDD still proved effective with a TPR around 71.3% compared to 7.4% of LSTM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]