Intelligent Traffic Classification for Detecting DDoS Attacks using SDN/OpenFlow

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks utilise many attacking entities to prevent legitimate use of a resource via consumption. Detecting these attacks is often difficult when using a traditional networking paradigm as network information and control are not centralised. Software-Defined Networking is a recent paradigm that centralises network control, thus improving the ability to gather network information. Traffic classification techniques can leverage the gathered data to detect DDoS attacks.This thesis utilises nmeta2, a SDN-based traffic classification architecture, to study the effectiveness of machine learning methods to detect DDoS attacks. These methods are evaluated on a physical network testbed to demonstrate their application during a DDoS attack scenario.