When Time Meets Space: Entropy Integration and Dynamic Threshold for Adaptive DDoS Detection in SDN
TL;DR
A lightweight spatiotemporal entropy-based detector for DDoS attacks using a constrained second-order Exponentially Weighted Moving Average threshold that jointly tracks entropy trend and volatility is proposed.
Abstract
Entropy-based Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) detection in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) commonly relies on spatial traffic distributions and static or loosely adaptive thresholds, making it vulnerable to legitimate traffic fluctuations in Internet of Things (IoT) environments. This paper proposes a lightweight spatiotemporal entropy-based detector for DDoS attacks. Spatial entropy is computed from dynamically selected traffic attribute pairs, while temporal entropy captures the randomness of packet inter-arrival times. The two normalized entropy measures are fused into a unified indicator and evaluated using a constrained second-order Exponentially Weighted Moving Average threshold that jointly tracks entropy trend and volatility. To prevent attack-contaminated observations from biasing threshold adaptation, threshold updates are performed only for windows classified as normal. Testbed results show 99.26% recall, a 0.9737 F1-score, and a 3.2% false positive rate (41.74% below that of spatial entropy alone). On CICDDoS2019, the method achieves an FPR of 0 and remains competitive with machine-learning-based methods. It requires 3.95 ms of core processing per window and 11.65% system-wide CPU utilization, supporting resource-constrained edge and IoT deployment.