Combining Particle Swarm Optimization and Entropy to Detect DDoS Attacks in the Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that is widely used to provide computing, data storage services and other remote resources over the Internet. Availability of cloud services is one of the most important concerns of cloud service providers. While cloud services are mainly transmitted over the Internet, they are prone to various attacks that may lead to the leakage of sensitive information. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is known as one of the most important security threats to the cloud computing environment. This attack is an explicit attempt by an attacker to block or deny access to shared services or resources in a cloud environment. This paper discusses a hybrid approach to dealing with DDoS attacks in the cloud computing environment. This method highlights the importance of effective feature-based selection methods and classification models. Here, an entropy-based approach and particle swarm optimization to counter these attacks in a cloud computing environment is presented. Categorizing high-dimensional data usually requires selecting the attribute as a pre-processing step to reduce the size. However, selecting effective features is a challenging task, which in this paper uses particle swarm optimization. Here, the proposed classification model is developed based on the use of a balanced binary search tree and dictionary data structure. The simulation is based on the NSL-KDD and CICDDoS۲۰۱۹ datasets, which prove the superiority of the proposed method with an average detection accuracy of ۹۹.۸۴% over the AGA, E-SVM and AE-DNN algorithms.

Keywords:

Cloud Computing , Attack Detection , Entropy , Particle Swarm Optimization , DDoS Attack