Performance Evaluation of SDN DDoS Attack Detection and Mitigation Based Random Forest and K-Nearest Neighbors Machine Learning Algorithms

Software-defined networks (SDN) have a centralized control architecture that makes them a tempting target for cyber attackers. One of the major threats is distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. It aims to exhaust network resources to make its services unavailable to legitimate users. DDoS attack detection based on machine learning algorithms is considered one of the most used techniques in SDN security. In this paper, four machine learning techniques (Random Forest, K-nearest neighbors, Naive Bayes, and Logistic Regression) have been tested to detect DDoS attacks. Also, a mitigation technique has been used to eliminate the attack effect on SDN. RF and KNN were selected because of their high accuracy results. Three types of network topology have been generated to observe the effectiveness of proposed algorithms on different network architectures. The results reveal that RF performs better than KNN in a single topology, and both have close performance in other topologies.