Comparing Metaheuristic Search Techniques in Addressing the Effectiveness of Clustering-Based DDoS Attack Detection Methods

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have increased in frequency and sophistication over the last ten years. Part of the challenge of defending against such attacks requires the analysis of very large volumes of data. Metaheuristic algorithms can assist in selecting relevant features from the network traffic data for use in DDoS detection models. By efficiently exploring different combinations of features, these methods can identify subsets that are informative for distinguishing between normal and attack traffic. However, identifying an optimized solution in this area is an open research question. Tuning the parameters of metaheuristic search techniques in the optimization process is critical. In this study, a switching approximation is used in a variety of metaheuristic search techniques. This approximation is used to find the best solution for the analysis of the network traffic features in either lower or upper values between 0 and 1. We compare the fine-tuning of this parameter against standard approaches and find that it is not substantially better than the BestFirst algorithm (a standard default approach for feature selection). This study contributes to the literature by testing and eliminating various fine-tuning strategies for the metaheuristic approach.