A Small Sample DDoS Attack Detection Method Based on Deep Transfer Learning

When using deep learning for DDoS attack detection, there is a general degradation in detection performance due to small sample size. This paper proposes a small-sample DDoS attack detection method based on deep transfer learning. First, deep learning techniques are used to train several neural networks that can be used for transfer in DDoS attacks with sufficient samples. Then we design a transferability metric to compare the transfer performance of different networks. With this metric, the network with the best transfer performance can be selected among the four networks. Then for a small sample of DDoS attacks, this paper demonstrates that the deep learning detection technique brings deterioration in performance, with the detection performance dropping from 99.28% to 67%. Finally, we end up with a 20.8% improvement in detection performance by deep transfer of the 8LANN network in the target domain. The experiment shows that the detection method based on deep transfer learning proposed in this paper can well improve the performance deterioration of deep learning techniques for small sample DDoS attack detection.