Optimized extreme learning machine for detecting DDoS attacks in cloud computing

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a serious security threat to cloud computing that affects the availability of cloud services. Therefore, defending against these attacks becomes imperative. In this paper, we present a DDoS attack detection system based on an improved Self-adaptive evolutionary extreme learning machine (SaE-ELM). SaE-ELM model is improved by incorporating two more features. Firstly, it can adapt the best suitable crossover operator. Secondly, it can automatically determine the appropriate number of hidden layer neurons. These features improve the learning and classification capabilities of the model. The proposed system is evaluated using four datasets namely, NSL-KDD, ISCX IDS 2012, UNSW-NB15, and CICIDS 2017. It achieves the detection accuracy of 86.80%, 98.90%, 89.17%, and 99.99% with NSL-KDD, ISCX IDS 2012, UNSW-NB15, and CICIDS 2017 datasets, respectively. The experiments show that the performance of the proposed attack detection system is better than the system based on original SaE-ELM and state-of-the-art techniques. However, it shows a longer training time than SaE-ELM based system. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.