A Deep Learning Game Theoretic Model for Defending Against Large Scale Smart Grid Attacks

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Power grids that are interdependent with communication networks create more possible modes of failure (e.g., cyberattacks) as well as more complex propagation of failure through the coupled networks. To ensure robust defense of smart grids, it is important to model both attacker and defender as intelligent, a scenario that the framework of game theory provides methods to analyze. However, prior works in applying game theoretic models to smart grid security limit the problem space to a small number targets under threat due to the inability of state-of-the-art methods to scale to large networks. Our method scales to large networks by combining neural networks that use featurized action representations with an approximation of large combinatorial actions to generalize knowledge about the best targets to attack/defend across graphs of various topologies and sizes. Our model’s invariance to the size of the input graph allows us to transfer knowledge from games played on small graphs during training to large graphs during evaluation. Our experiments show that our method can learn Nash equilibrium strategies on small networks, and demonstrate low exploitability when generalized to large networks, especially compared to the common heuristics currently used to simulate attacks on large graphs.