Detection of known and unknown DDoS attacks using Artificial Neural Networks

The key objective of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is to compile multiple systems across the Internet with infected zombies/agents and form botnets of networks. Such zombies are designed to attack a particular target or network with different types of packets. The infected systems are remotely controlled either by an attacker or by self-installed Trojans (e.g. roj/Flood-IM) that are programmed to launch packet floods. Within this context, the purpose of this paper is to detect and mitigate known and unknown DDoS attacks in real time environments. We have chosen an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithm to detect DDoS attacks based on specific characteristic features (patterns) that separate DDoS attack traffic from genuine traffic.