Detection of Low-Rate Cloud DDoS Attacks in Frequency Domain Using Fast Hartley Transform

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack has been a serious threat to the availability feature of cloud computing. As traditional DDoS attacks are implemented using a huge volume of malicious traffic, the detection of such attacks becomes a naive task. To evade this detection, attackers are moving towards the Low-Rate DDoS (LRDDoS) attacks. The stealthy behavior of LRDDoS attack makes it difficult to get detected due to its low volume traffic. The existing frequency-domain approaches for LRDDoS detection are not feasible in terms of computational and storage requirements. This paper aims to propose a lightweight, accurate, and adaptive approach for the detection of LRDDoS attacks in frequency-domain. In this paper, the LRDDoS attack is detected by analyzing the power spectral distribution. The novelty of the proposed approach is to calculate the power spectral density using Fast Hartley Transform (FHT). The FHT processes real-valued input data, and has low computational and storage complexities. The approach is implemented on OpenStack cloud platform, and the aggregate network traffic (external and internal) is captured and analyzed. Experimental results show that the computational and storage complexities involved in FHT are lower than other transformation algorithms’ complexities. Thus, the approach provides faster response with an average detection time of 60.16 s. The average true negative and true positive rates obtained by the proposed approach are 99.83% and 99.46% respectively, which are competitive.