Reinforced Transformer Learning for VSI-DDoS Detection in Edge Clouds

• Edge-driven software applications often deployed as online services in the cloud-to-edge continuum lack significant protection for services and infrastructures against emerging cyberattacks. Very-Short Intermittent Distributed Denial of Service (VSI-DDoS) attack is one of the biggest factor for diminishing the Quality of Services (QoS) and Quality of Experiences (QoE) for users on edge. Unlike conventional DDoS attacks, these attacks live for a very short time (on the order of a few milliseconds) in the traffic to deceive users with a legitimate service experience. To provide protection, we propose a novel and efficient approach for detecting VSI-DDoS attacks using reinforced transformer learning that mitigates the tail latency and service availability problems in edge clouds. In the presence of attacks, the users’ demand for availing ultra-low latency and high throughput services deployed on the edge, can never be met. Moreover, these attacks send very-short intermittent requests towards the target services that enforce longer delays in users’ responses. The assimilation of transformer with deep reinforcement learning accelerates detection performance under adverse conditions by adapting the dynamic and the most discernible patterns of attacks (e.g., multiplicative temporal dependency, attack dynamism). The extensive experiments with testbed and benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach is suitable, effective, and efficient for detecting VSI-DDoS attacks in edge clouds. The results outperform state-of-the-art methods with 0.9%-3.2% higher accuracy in both datasets.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Datorsystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Computer Systems (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Cloud applications

Cloud computing

Computer crime

Denial-of-service attack

Edge clouds

Image edge detection

QoS/QoE

Quality of service

Reinforced transformer learning

Reinforcement learning

Throughput

Transformers

VSI-DDoS

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)