Stealthy data integrity attack identification in smart grid networks utilizing deep denoising autoencoder

Abstract

Smart grids arose as the largest cyber-physical systems with the integration of sophisticated control, computing, and state-of-the-art communications. Like all cyber-physical systems, the smart grids are vulnerable to malicious cyber assaults due to their enormous dependency on communication networks. Various machine learning-based schemes are being investigated in the industry and academia to develop robust defense mechanisms to counter cyber assaults. However, the curse of high dimensionality, which increases with the escalating evolution of an electric power system, infringes upon the efficiency of machine learning models employed to detect such assaults. To this end, this paper proposes a deep denoising autoencoder (DAE)-based framework for dimensionality reduction that learns salient feature representation for high-dimensional, multi-variant smart grid measurement data collected from the smart grids. The latent space apprehended by DAE is then fed to binary support vector machine (SVM) to determine the assaulted data. Various standard IEEE test cases are employed in simulations. The results show that the proposed scheme learns more robust features that reveal the nonlinear properties exhibited in the smart grid measurements, further leading to improved detection accuracy of the classifier as compared to existing approaches.