Lightweight Rescaled Range R/S-Based Real-Time DDoS Detection for Software-Defined Networks

Software-defined Networking (SDN) is a promising networking architecture that separates the control and data planes to allow flexible network management. However, the SDN architecture makes networks vulnerable to various security threats, such as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. A DDoS attack is one of the most common SDN threats, aiming to exhaust a network’s computational and bandwidth resources. Self-similarity is a statistical property of time series in which data patterns repeat at different time scales. Several studies have shown that network traffic exhibits increased self-similarity during DDoS attacks, making it a promising tool for DDoS detection. Despite the effectiveness of statistical methods for detecting DDoS, some methods, such as self-similarity, are discarded due to their high computational cost, leading to detection delays. This paper proposes a lightweight Rescaled Range (R/S)-based scheme for effective real-time DDoS attack detection in SDN. The scheme employs the Welford online algorithm to compute statistical parameters of the R/S scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme efficiently captures changes in self-similarity and detects TCP/UDP DDoS attacks in real time. Moreover, it achieves high detection performance compared to other R/S methods, with a False Positive Rate (FPR) below 0.5% and an average computation time of 0.047 ms.