skip to main content
10.1145/3555050.3569121acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesconextConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Public Access

Xatu: boosting existing DDoS detection systems using auxiliary signals

Published: 30 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Traditional DDoS attack detection monitors volumetric traffic features to detect attack onset. To reduce false positives, such detection is often conservative---raising an alert only after a sustained period of observed anomalous behavior. However, contemporary attacks tend to be short, which combined with a long detection delay means that most of the attack still reaches and impacts the victim. We propose Xatu, a system that utilizes auxiliary signals to improve the accuracy and timeliness of existing DDoS detection systems. We explore two types of auxiliary signals, attack preparation signals and the history of prior attacks. These signals can be easily mined from existing traffic monitoring systems in many ISP networks. To leverage these auxiliary signals for attack detection, we propose a multi-timescale LSTM model, which derives both long-term and short-term patterns from diverse auxiliary signals. We then leverage survival analysis to quickly detect attacks when they occur while minimizing false positives and thus scrubbing costs. We evaluate Xatu on traffic from a large ISP, using commercial defense alert data to label prevalent attack events. Xatu would help the commercial defense scrub up to 44.1% additional anomalous traffic and would reduce its median detection delay by 9.5 minutes.1

References

[1]
Ahamed Aljuhani. 2021. Machine Learning Approaches for Combating Distributed Denial of Service Attacks in Modern Networking Environments. IEEE Access (2021).
[2]
Tomasz Andrysiak and Łukasz Saganowski. 2016. DDoS Attacks Detection by Means of Statistical Models. In Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Recognition Systems CORES. 797--806.
[3]
Manos Antonakakis, Tim April, Michael Bailey, Matt Bernhard, Elie Bursztein, Jaime Cochran, Zakir Durumeric, J Alex Halderman, Luca Invernizzi, Michalis Kallitsis, et al. 2017. Understanding the Mirai Botnet. In USENIX Security Symposium. 1093--1110.
[4]
Katerina J Argyraki and David R Cheriton. 2005. Active Internet Traffic Filtering: Real-Time Response to Denial-of-Service Attacks. In USENIX ATC, Vol. 38.
[5]
Alexandru G Bardas, Loai Zomlot, Sathya Chandran Sundaramurthy, Xinming Ou, S Raj Rajagopalan, and Marc R Eisenbarth. 2012. Classification of UDP Traffic for DDoS Detection. In LEET.
[6]
Robert Beverly and Steven Bauer. 2005. The Spoofer Project: Inferring the Extent of Source Address Filtering on the Internet. In Usenix Sruti, Vol. 5. 53--59.
[7]
Ryan Brunt, Prakhar Pandey, and Damon McCoy. 2017. Booted: An Analysis of a Payment Intervention on a DDoS-for-hire Service. In Workshop on the Economics of Information Security. 06--26.
[8]
Xue Cai and John Heidemann. 2010. Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM. 99--110.
[9]
CAIDA. 2007. The CAIDA UCSD "DDoS Attack 2007" Dataset. https://www.caida.org/catalog/datasets/ddos-20070804_dataset
[10]
Glenn Carl, George Kesidis, Richard R Brooks, and Suresh Rai. 2006. Denial-of-service Attack-detection Techniques. IEEE Internet computing 10, 1 (2006), 82--89.
[11]
Wentao Chang, Aziz Mohaisen, An Wang, and Songqing Chen. 2015. Measuring Botnets in the Wild: Some New Trends. In Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security. 645--650.
[12]
Min Cheng, Qian Xu, Jianming Lv, Wenyin Liu, Qing Li, and Jianping Wang. 2016. MS-LSTM: A Multi-scale LSTM Model for BGP Anomaly Detection. In IEEE ICNP. 1--6.
[13]
Michelle Cotton and Leo Vegoda. 2010. Special Use IPv4 Addresses. Technical Report.
[14]
Jakub Czyz, Michael Kallitsis, Manaf Gharaibeh, Christos Papadopoulos, Michael Bailey, and Manish Karir. 2014. Taming the 800 Pound Gorilla: The Rise and Decline of NTP DDoS Attacks. In Proceedings of IMC.
[15]
Alberto Dainotti, Karyn Benson, Alistair King, Bradley Huffaker, Eduard Glatz, Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, Philipp Richter, Alessandro Finamore, and Alex C Snoeren. 2016. Lost in Space: Improving Inference of IPv4 Address Space Utilization. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 34, 6 (2016), 1862--1876.
[16]
Michele De Donno, Nicola Dragoni, Alberto Giaretta, and Angelo Spognardi. 2018. DDoS-capable IoT Malwares: Comparative Analysis and Mirai Investigation. Security and Communication Networks 2018 (2018).
[17]
Van Thuan Do, Paal Engelstad, Boning Feng, and Thanh van Do. 2017. Detection of DNS Tunneling in Mobile Networks Using Machine Learning. In International Conference on Information Science and Applications. 221--230.
[18]
Rohan Doshi, Noah Apthorpe, and Nick Feamster. 2018. Machine learning DDoS Detection for Consumer Internet of Things Devices. In IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops. 29--35.
[19]
Sam Edwards and Ioannis Profetis. 2016. Hajime: Analysis of a Decentralized Internet Worm for IoT Devices. Rapidity Networks 16 (2016).
[20]
Seyed K Fayaz, Yoshiaki Tobioka, Vyas Sekar, and Michael Bailey. 2015. Bohatei: Flexible and Elastic DDoS Defense. In USENIX Security Symposium. 817--832.
[21]
Laura Feinstein, Dan Schnackenberg, Ravindra Balupari, and Darrell Kindred. 2003. Statistical Approaches to DDoS Attack Detection and Response. In Proceedings DARPA information survivability conference and exposition, Vol. 1. 303--314.
[22]
Massimo Ficco and Massimiliano Rak. 2014. Stealthy Denial of Service Strategy in Cloud Computing. IEEE transactions on cloud computing 3, 1 (2014), 80--94.
[23]
Ramin Fadaei Fouladi, Cemil Eren Kayatas, and Emin Anarim. 2018. Statistical Measures: Promising Features for Time Series based DDoS Attack Detection. In Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute Proceedings, Vol. 2. 96.
[24]
Felix A Gers, Jürgen Schmidhuber, and Fred Cummins. 1999. Learning to Forget: Continual Prediction with LSTM. (1999).
[25]
Edit Gombay. 2008. Change Detection in Autoregressive Time Series. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 99, 3 (2008), 451--464.
[26]
Google. 2022. Project Shield. https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/landing
[27]
Olivia A Grigg, VT Farewell, and DJ Spiegelhalter. 2003. Use of risk-adjusted CUSUM and RSPRT charts for monitoring in medical contexts. Statistical Methods in Medical Research 12, 2 (2003), 147--170.
[28]
Tin Kam Ho. 1995. Random Decision Forests. In Proceedings of international conference on document analysis and recognition, Vol. 1. 278--282.
[29]
Rick Hofstede, Václav Bartoš, Anna Sperotto, and Aiko Pras. 2013. Towards Real-time Intrusion Detection for NetFlow and IPFIX. In Proceedings of International Conference on Network and Service Management. 227--234.
[30]
Mohamed Idhammad, Karim Afdel, and Mustapha Belouch. 2018. Detection System of HTTP DDoS Attacks in a Cloud Environment based on Information Theoretic Entropy and Random Forest. Security and Communication Networks 2018 (2018).
[31]
ImpactCyberTrust.org. 2016. Merit Network "RADB DDoS 2016" Dataset. https://www.impactcybertrust.org/dataset_view?idDataset=576
[32]
Imperva. 2022. How To Choose The Right Mitigation Service. https://www.imperva.com/learn/ddos/ddos-mitigation-services
[33]
Amazon Web Services Inc. 2022. AWS Shield. https://aws.amazon.com/shield
[34]
Cloudflare Inc. 2022. Cloudflare DDoS Protection. https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos
[35]
ISC. 2022. DShield Reports and Database Summaries. https://isc.sans.edu/reports.html
[36]
ISC. 2022. General Information On Submitting Logs To DShield. https://isc.sans.edu/howto.html
[37]
Shuyuan Jin and Daniel S Yeung. 2004. A Covariance Analysis Model for DDoS Attack Detection. In IEEE International Conference on Communications, Vol. 4. 1882--1886.
[38]
Mattijs Jonker, Alistair King, Johannes Krupp, Christian Rossow, Anna Sperotto, and Alberto Dainotti. 2017. Millions of Targets under Attack: a Macroscopic Characterization of the DoS Ecosystem. In Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference. 100--113.
[39]
Mattijs Jonker, Anna Sperotto, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Ramin Sadre, and Aiko Pras. 2016. Measuring the Adoption of DDoS Protection Services. In Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference. 279--285.
[40]
Diederik P Kingma and Jimmy Ba. 2014. Adam: A method for Stochastic Optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980 (2014).
[41]
John P Klein and Melvin L Moeschberger. 2006. Survival Analysis: Techniques for Censored and Truncated Data.
[42]
Constantinos Kolias, Georgios Kambourakis, Angelos Stavrou, and Jeffrey Voas. 2017. DDoS in the IoT: Mirai and Other Botnets. Computer 50, 7 (2017), 80--84.
[43]
Matthieu Latapy, Clémence Magnien, and Nathalie Del Vecchio. 2008. Basic Notions for the Analysis of Large Two-mode Networks. Social networks 30, 1 (2008), 31--48.
[44]
Steve Lawrence, C Lee Giles, Ah Chung Tsoi, and Andrew D Back. 1997. Face Recognition: A Convolutional Neural-network Approach. IEEE transactions on neural networks 8, 1 (1997), 98--113.
[45]
Qi Li, Weishi Li, Junfeng Wang, and Mingyu Cheng. 2019. A SQL Injection Detection Method Based on Adaptive Deep Forest. IEEE Access 7 (2019), 145385--145394.
[46]
Andy Liaw, Matthew Wiener, et al. 2002. Classification and Regression by Random Forest. R news 2, 3 (2002), 18--22.
[47]
Franziska Lichtblau, Florian Streibelt, Thorben Krüger, Philipp Richter, and Anja Feldmann. 2017. Detection, Classification, and Analysis of Inter-domain Traffic with Spoofed Source IP Addresses. In Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference. 86--99.
[48]
Zaoxing Liu, Hun Namkung, Georgios Nikolaidis, Jeongkeun Lee, Changhoon Kim, Xin Jin, Vladimir Braverman, Minlan Yu, and Vyas Sekar. 2021. Jaqen: A High-Performance Switch-Native Approach for Detecting and Mitigating Volumetric DDoS Attacks with Programmable Switches. In 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 21). 3829--3846.
[49]
Matthew Luckie, Robert Beverly, Ryan Koga, Ken Keys, Joshua A Kroll, and K Claffy. 2019. Network Hygiene, Incentives, and Regulation: Deployment of Source Address Validation in the Internet. In Proceedings of ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 465--480.
[50]
Steve Mansfield-Devine. 2014. The evolution of DDoS. Computer Fraud & Security 2014, 10 (2014), 15--20.
[51]
Pierre-François Marteau. 2021. Random Partitioning Forest for Point-Wise and Collective Anomaly Detection---Application to Network Intrusion Detection. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 16 (2021), 2157--2172.
[52]
Mary Meeker and Liang Wu. 2013. Internet Trends. In Proc D11 Conference.
[53]
Nisharani Meti, DG Narayan, and VP Baligar. 2017. Detection of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Using Machine Learning Algorithms in Software-defined Networks. In International conference on advances in computing, communications and informatics. 1366--1371.
[54]
Rui Miao, Rahul Potharaju, Minlan Yu, and Navendu Jain. 2015. The Dark Menace: Characterizing Network-based Attacks in the Cloud. In Proceedings of IMC.
[55]
Microsoft. 2022. Azure DDoS Protection Overview. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ddos-protection/ddos-protection-overview
[56]
Microsoft. 2022. DDoS Protection and Mitigation Services. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/ddos-protection
[57]
Yisroel Mirsky, Tomer Doitshman, Yuval Elovici, and Asaf Shabtai. 2018. Kitsune: an Ensemble of Autoencoders for Online Network Intrusion Detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.09089 (2018).
[58]
Giovane CM Moura, Cristian Hesselman, Gerald Schaapman, Nick Boerman, and Octavia de Weerdt. 2020. Into the DDoS Maelstrom: a Longitudinal Study of a Scrubbing Service. In IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops. 550--558.
[59]
Giovane CM Moura, Ricardo de O Schmidt, John Heidemann, Wouter B de Vries, Moritz Muller, Lan Wei, and Cristian Hesselman. 2016. Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 root DNS event. In Proceedings of IMC.
[60]
RIPE NCC. 2022. RIPE Routing Information Service (RIS). https://www.ripe.net/analyse/internet-measurements/routing-information-service-ris
[61]
NETSCOUT. 2020. NETSCOUT Maintains #1 Position in the DDoS Prevention Appliance Market. https://www.netscout.com/report/omdia-ddos-prevention-appliances-excerpts
[62]
NETSCOUT. 2022. Arbor DDoS Attack Protection Solutions. https://www.netscout.com/arbor-ddos
[63]
Sean Newman. 2019. Under the Radar: the Danger of Stealthy DDoS Attacks. Network Security 2019, 2 (2019), 18--19.
[64]
Pavel Odintsov. 2022. FastNetMon. https://github.com/pavel-odintsov/fastnetmon
[65]
University of Oregon. 2022. Route Views Project. http://bgplay.routeviews.org
[66]
Dhruva Patil, Bruce A Draper, and J Ross Beveridge. 2019. Looking under the Hood: Visualizing What LSTMs Learn. In International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition. 67--80.
[67]
Tianrui Peng, Ian Harris, and Yuki Sawa. 2018. Detecting Phishing Attacks Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. In IEEE international conference on semantic computing. 300--301.
[68]
Xi Qin, Tongge Xu, and Chao Wang. 2015. DDoS Attack Detection Using Flow Entropy and Clustering Technique. In International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Security. 412--415.
[69]
Sivaramakrishnan Ramanathan, Jelena Mirkovic, and Minlan Yu. 2020. BLAG: Improving the Accuracy of Blacklists. In Proceedings of NDSS.
[70]
Sivaramakrishnan Ramanathan, Jelena Mirkovic, Minlan Yu, and Ying Zhang. 2018. SENSS against volumetric DDoS Attacks. In Proceedings of Annual Computer Security Applications Conference. 266--277.
[71]
Yakov Rekhter, Bob Moskowitz, Daniel Karrenberg, Geert Jan de Groot, and Eliot Lear. 1996. Address Allocation for Private Internets. Technical Report.
[72]
Gilles Roudière and Philippe Owezarski. 2018. Evaluating the Impact of Traffic Sampling on AATAC's DDoS Detection. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Traffic Measurements for Cybersecurity. 27--32.
[73]
José Jair Santanna, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Rick Hofstede, Anna Sperotto, Mark Wierbosch, Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville, and Aiko Pras. 2015. Booters---Analysis of DDoS-as-a-service Attacks. In IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management. 243--251.
[74]
Lumin Shi, Samuel Mergendahl, Devkishen Sisodia, and Jun Li. 2020. Bridging Missing Gaps in Evaluating DDoS Research. In USENIX Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test.
[75]
Ningombam Anandshree Singh, Khundrakpam Johnson Singh, and Tanmay De. 2016. Distributed Denial of Service Attack Detection Using Naive Bayes Classifier Through info Gain Feature Selection. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Informatics and Analytics. 1--9.
[76]
Robert Smith and Shawn Marck. 2019. Identifying a Potential DDOS Attack Using Statistical Analysis. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160127406A1/en
[77]
Akamai Technologies. 2022. Large, Complex DDoS Attacks on the Rise in 2020 - The Akamai Blog. https://blogs.akamai.com/2020/07/large-complex-ddos-attacks-on-the-rise-in-2020.html
[78]
Cecilia Testart, Philipp Richter, Alistair King, Alberto Dainotti, and David Clark. 2019. Profiling BGP Serial Hijackers: Capturing Persistent Misbehavior in the Global Routing Table. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference. 420--434.
[79]
Liam Tung. 2022. DDoS Attackers Have Found This New Trick to Knock over Websites. https://www.zdnet.com/article/attackers-now-hit-firewalls-to-knock-out-websites/
[80]
Verizon. 2020. DDoS Security - Service Level Agreement. https://enterprise.verizon.com/service_guide/reg/cp_ddos_security_sla.pdf
[81]
Daniel Wagner, Daniel Kopp, Matthias Wichtlhuber, Christoph Dietzel, Oliver Hohlfeld, Georgios Smaragdakis, and Anja Feldmann. 2021. United We Stand: Collaborative Detection and Mitigation of Amplification DDoS Attacks at Scale. In Proceedings of Computer and Communications Security. 970--987.
[82]
Jason Weil, Victor Kuarsingh, Chris Donley, Christopher Liljenstolpe, and Marla Azinger. 2012. IANA-reserved IPv4 Prefix for Shared Address Space. Technical Report.
[83]
Matthias Wichtlhuber, Eric Strehle, Daniel Kopp, Lars Prepens, Stefan Stegmueller, Alina Rubina, Christoph Dietzel, and Oliver Hohlfeld. 2022. IXP Scrubber: Learning from Blackholing Traffic for ML-Driven DDoS Detection at Scale. In Proceedings of SIGCOMM.
[84]
James Edward Winquist, Joseph Welch, Tim Hoffman, and Olan Patrick Barnes. 2016. Forced Alert Thresholds for Profiled Detection. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9344440
[85]
Wired. 2018. A 1.3-Tbs DDoS Hit GitHub, the Largest Yet Recorded. https://www.wired.com/story/github-ddos-memcached/
[86]
Xi Xiao, Shaofeng Zhang, Francesco Mercaldo, Guangwu Hu, and Arun Kumar Sangaiah. 2019. Android Malware Detection based on System Call Sequences and LSTM. Multimedia Tools and Applications 78, 4 (2019), 3979--3999.
[87]
Guang Yao, Jun Bi, and Peiyao Xiao. 2013. VASE: Filtering IP Spoofing Traffic with Agility. Computer Networks 57, 1 (2013), 243--257.
[88]
Menghao Zhang, Guanyu Li, Shicheng Wang, Chang Liu, Ang Chen, Hongxin Hu, Guofei Gu, Qianqian Li, Mingwei Xu, and Jianping Wu. 2020. Poseidon: Mitigating Volumetric DDoS Attacks with Programmable Switches. In Proceedings of NDSS.
[89]
Panpan Zheng, Shuhan Yuan, and Xintao Wu. 2019. Safe: A Neural Survival Analysis Model for Fraud Early Detection. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference, Vol. 33. 1278--1285.
[90]
Shengbao Zheng and Xiaowei Yang. 2019. Dynashield: Reducing the Cost of DDoS Defense Using Cloud Services. In USENIX HotCloud 19.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)An End-to-end Online DDoS Mitigation Scheme for Network Forwarding Devices2024 7th World Conference on Computing and Communication Technologies (WCCCT)10.1109/WCCCT60665.2024.10541398(1-5)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Leveraging Prefix Structure to Detect Volumetric DDoS Attack Signatures with Programmable Switches2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP54263.2024.00267(4535-4553)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
  • (2023)SAV-D: Defending DDoS with Incremental Deployment of SAVIEEE Internet Computing10.1109/MIC.2023.326431927:3(44-49)Online publication date: 1-May-2023

Index Terms

  1. Xatu: boosting existing DDoS detection systems using auxiliary signals

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      CoNEXT '22: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
      November 2022
      431 pages
      ISBN:9781450395083
      DOI:10.1145/3555050
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 30 November 2022

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. DDoS attack detection
      2. machine learning

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Funding Sources

      Conference

      CoNEXT '22
      Sponsor:

      Acceptance Rates

      CoNEXT '22 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 151 submissions, 19%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 789 submissions, 25%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)285
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)31
      Reflects downloads up to 12 Sep 2024

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)An End-to-end Online DDoS Mitigation Scheme for Network Forwarding Devices2024 7th World Conference on Computing and Communication Technologies (WCCCT)10.1109/WCCCT60665.2024.10541398(1-5)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2024
      • (2024)Leveraging Prefix Structure to Detect Volumetric DDoS Attack Signatures with Programmable Switches2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP54263.2024.00267(4535-4553)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
      • (2023)SAV-D: Defending DDoS with Incremental Deployment of SAVIEEE Internet Computing10.1109/MIC.2023.326431927:3(44-49)Online publication date: 1-May-2023

      View Options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Get Access

      Login options

      Media

      Figures

      Other

      Tables

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media