Detection of false data cyber-attacks for the assessment of security in smart grid using deep learning

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2021.107211Get rights and content

Abstract

Smart Grid uses electricity and information flows to set up a highly developed, fully automated, and distributed electricity grid system. To identify the reliability of work and availability, cyber attacks detection in the smart grids play a significant role. This paper highlights the integrity of false data cyber-attacks in the physical layers of smart grids. As the first contribution, the Proposed True Data Integrity provides an attack exposure metric through an Agent-Based Model. Next, the research focuses on the decentralization of Data Integrity Security in the system with an Agent-based approach. Finally, the productivity and efficiency of the developed modeling techniques are experimentally evaluated and compared with the existing state-of-the-art supervised deep-learning models. The obtained results of the studies have shown the improved false data detection accuracy of 98.19% through replay cyber-attacks using the Artificial Feed-forward Network. Based on the research findings, deep neural network can be used to assess cyber data in smart grids to detect malware incidents and attacks.

Introduction

Power grids are formed by the integration of electrical lines and other supporting devices to create a network. It has been used to transform a particular unit of energy for a network. In recent years, to enhance performance, management, planning, and other operative control, the smart grid uses information and communication technologies, and the new framework is called smart grids. These smart grids have to maintain a feature called Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), and it is responsible for gathering and distributing data from the end-user to the service side [1]. NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology) [6] suggested that an advanced power grid comprises various fields like generating, transmitting, distributing, managing, and configuring information across the network [2]. The processes in each area incorporate devices that are meant to be primary and secondary. Electric energy and information are frequently used among smart grid domains, as depicted in Fig. 1. It shows the flow of processes made through the smart grid model. The energy grid devices responsible for power generation, transmission, and accumulation are primary devices. In contrast, end nodes involving intelligent electronic devices, servers, networking, and monitoring devices are secondary devices [3].

The smart power grid is said to be the riskiest and vulnerable cyber-attack. False Data Detection is a kind of cyber-attacks capable of manipulating the condition of the entire system. The current detection system fails to identify the False Data Detection Cyber-Attacks (FDDCA). The research work describes the process of detecting these types of new stealthy cyber-attacks, their effects, and how they are structured on the smart grid. Machine Learning (ML) [4] methods can classify secure measurements with the attacked measures. These have become popular in recent researches. To classify the protected data from the intruder, Artificial Feed-forward Network (AFN) has been proposed [5,7]. This Classification is achieved by considering the distance metric as the cost function in machine learning from high dimensional space. The cost function is used to classify the secured data from malicious data effectively. A complete performance evaluation is designed for a specific set of attacked data, and the results are validated and compared with other ML methods. Using an Artificial feed-forward network, the model can travel in a unidirectional manner, and sometimes it may have hidden layers. This positively supports the complex functions without any difficulty.

The objectives of the research work are mentioned below:

  • 1

    The grid's nature is analyzed in various fields: the type of stealthy attack in which the smart grid is vulnerable to an attack. Different methods and algorithms will retrieve data from the smart Data for applying in DL.

  • 2

    FDDCA and optimal adaptive load shedding are investigated by decentralizing the system integrity protection scheme with True Data Integrity by Agent-Based Model (TDI-ABM).

  • 3

    Deep Learning (DL) methods are applied for data retrieval from the network. False Data Detection (FDD) is to detect the attack in the smart grid.

  • 4

    The output will classify the secured data from the intruder data of the result from the neural network. The evaluation and analysis showed that the proposed TDI-ABM works well in identifying malicious cyber-attacks.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the related works of various methods that are vulnerable to an attack using the smart grid. Section 3 describes the fundamental process of smart grid power system and proposed deep learning model for cyber-attack identification. Section 4 portrays the False Data detection of cyber-attack, and section 5 describes False Data detection. Later, Section 6 presents a detailed study of the Test system used for experimental evaluation. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper with summary of the work and future work directions.

Section snippets

Related works

In the new age Smart Grids, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) framework is used to improve interconnection and manipulation necessities [8]. To manage operations and to perform transmission and distribution, the traditional power grid depends upon the SCADA framework as the technology gets effect into cybersecurity in smart cities. But till now, it has various limitations like lack of understanding, importance, and consistency. There are different types of cybersecurity attacks:

Fundamental process of smart grid power system

The reliability of the electric smart grid system in an area is maintained by Independent System Operators (ISOs) [19] and Regional Transmission Organisation (RTOs) [18]. These are proof for distribution, time management, detecting the output from equipment, power redirection during congestion, and intercommunication between nodes expand the framework. The reliability of the system is maintained by implementing independent strategies among organizations with another user in public. Control

False data detection of cyber attack (FDDCA)

FDDCA is similar to spoofing attacks that violate data integrity. Measurement false data is distributed and utilized in a different part of the grid. Hence, any change in the measurement data will damage the sensor. In a secured condition, the measurement vector 'i' is generated by the AFN model's sensor. The injected false value remains undetermined in the False Data Detection (FDD) model. As the attack vector is in the network, it spoils the operational decision and leads to more significant

Method of false data detection (FDD)

An autoencoder is responsible for generating data. Average and false data are classified by the anomaly detection module generated by the encoder. Autoencoder rectifies the error by calculating and analyzing the error. Various features are interrelated to each other, and the autoencoder learns these interrelations. The autoencoder trains the nature of the normal data. Once the autoencoder gets trained, it must be verified. Training starts from normal data, and malicious training is also

Test system

The preparation of the test system is described in this section. MATLAB is used for analysis and system estimation, which is mentioned on the IEEE 14-bus standard.

Conclusion and future work

The presented research on the smart grid demonstrates the need for false data detection to measure the potential and physical damaging effects of FDCA. The proposed model will benefit the smart grid systems under the linear smart power distribution model for grid actions. The utilization of the physical attributes developed by the proposed agent-based model enhanced the reliability of smart grids and proposed model is validated with the Cyber Attack replay. The agent-based approach reinvents

Declaration of Competing Interest

All authors declare no conflict of interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology, India for the financial support through Mathematical Research Impact Centric Support (MATRICS) scheme (MTR/2019/000542). The authors also acknowledge SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur for extending infrastructural support to carry out this research work.

Author statement

All persons who meet authorship criteria are listed as authors, and all authors certify that they have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content, including participation in the concept, design, analysis, writing, or revision of the manuscript. Only persons who have made substantial contributions to the work reported in the manuscript are listed as authors.

Sudhakar Sengan is presently working as Professor in dept. of CSE at PSN College of Engineering and Technology, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India. He received Ph.D. degree in ICE in 2014 at Anna University, Chennai. He has 20 years of experience in Teaching/ Research/Industry. His research includes Network Security, Information Security, MANET, Cloud Computing, IoT. He published 100 Articles/Books in Journals and Conferences.

References (25)

  • Y. Jiang et al.

    Blackstart capability planning for power system restoration

    Int J Electr Power Energy Syst

    (2017)
  • Peter Eder-Neuhauser et al.

    Cyber-attack models for smart grid environments

    Sustain Energy Grids Netw

    (2017)
  • Daniel B Araya et al.

    An ensemble learning framework for anomaly detection in building energy consumption

    Energy Build

    (2017)
  • Z.H. Yu et al.

    Blind false data injection attack using PCA approximation method in smart grid

    IEEE Trans Smart Grid

    (2015)
  • Y. Mo et al.

    Cyber-physical security of a smart grid infrastructure

    Proc IEEE

    (2012)
  • O. Stan et al.

    A new crypto-classifier service for energy efficiency in smart cities

  • M. Raciti et al.

    Embedded cyber-physical anomaly detection in smart meters

  • A. Giani et al.

    Smart grid data integrity attacks

    IEEE Trans. Smart Grid

    (2013)
  • NIST framework and roadmap for smart grid interoperability standards

    NIST Spec Publ

    (2010)
  • T.J. Overbye et al.

    The smart grid and PMUs: operational challenges and opportunities

    IEEE Power Energy Soc Gen Meeting, PES

    (2010)
  • A. Ashok et al.

    Cyber-physical attack-resilient wide-area monitoring, protection, and control for the power grid

    Proc IEEE

    (2017)
  • ANSI C12.22-2008: Protocol Specification For Interfacing to Data Communication Networks (Draft)

    (2008)
  • Cited by (56)

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Sudhakar Sengan is presently working as Professor in dept. of CSE at PSN College of Engineering and Technology, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India. He received Ph.D. degree in ICE in 2014 at Anna University, Chennai. He has 20 years of experience in Teaching/ Research/Industry. His research includes Network Security, Information Security, MANET, Cloud Computing, IoT. He published 100 Articles/Books in Journals and Conferences.

    Subramaniyaswamy V is currently working as an Associate Professor in the SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur, India. In total, he has 16 years of experience in research and academia. He has published more than 125 papers in reputed international journals and conferences. His research interests include artificial intelligence, recommender systems, machine learning, and Internet of Things.

    Indragandhi V is serving as an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering, VIT, Vellore, India. She published more than 100 research articles in reputed international journals and top conferences. She authored a book which is published by Elsevier, Academic Press. Her research interests include Power Electronics, Soft computing Techniques and Smart Grid.

    Priya Velayutham received her Ph.D. degree in Information and Communication Engineering in 2017 at Anna University, Chennai. She is currently working as an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at Paavai Engineering College, Namakkal, Tamilnadu, India. She has more than 12 years of experience in Teaching and Research. She published many articles in reputed International Journals.

    Logesh Ravi is an Associate Professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr. Sagunthala R&D Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India. Dr. Logesh Ravi has published more than 90 papers in reputed international journals and conferences. His research interests include artificial intelligence, recommender systems, big data, machine learning, information retrieval, fintech and social computing.

    This paper is for special section VSI-gridl. Reviews processed and recommended for publication by Guest Editor Dr. G. Jeon.

    View full text