Abstract
This paper explores the critical issue of enhancing
cybersecurity measures for low-cost, Wi-Fi-based Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) against Distributed Denial of Service
(DDoS) attacks. In the current work, we have explored three
variants of DDoS attacks, namely Transmission Control Proto
col (TCP), Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), and TCP
+ ICMPflooding attacks, and developed a detection mechanism
that runs on the companion computer of the UAV system.
As a part of the detection mechanism, we have evaluated
various machine learning, and deep learning algorithms, such as
XGBoost, Isolation Forest, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM),
Bidirectional-LSTM (Bi-LSTM), LSTM with attention, Bi
LSTM with attention, and Time Series Transformer (TST) in
terms of various classification metrics. Our evaluation reveals
that algorithms with attention mechanisms outperform their
counterparts in general, and TST stands out as the most
efficient model with a run time of ∼0.1 seconds. TST has
demonstrated an F1 score of 0.999, 0.997, and 0.943 for TCP,
ICMP, and TCP + ICMP flooding attacks respectively. In this
work, we present the necessary steps required to build an on
board DDoS detection mechanism. Further, we also present the
ablation study to identify the best TST hyperparameters for
DDoS detection, and we have also underscored the advantage
of adapting learnable positional embeddings in TST for DDoS
detection with an improvement in F1 score from 0.94 to 0.99.