Detecting Stealthy False Data Injection Using Machine Learning in Smart Grid

Aging power industries together with increase in the demand from industrial and residential customers are the main incentive for policy makers to define a road map to the next generation power system called smart grid. In smart grid, the overall monitoring costs will be decreased but at the same time, the risk of cyber attacks might be increased. Recently a new type of attacks (called the stealth attack) has been introduced, which cannot be detected by the bad data detection using state estimation. In this paper, we show how normal operations of power networks can be statistically distinguished from the case under stealthy attacks. We devise two machine learning based techniques for stealthy attack detection. The first method utilizes supervised learning over labeled data and trains a support vector machine. The second method requires no training data and detects the deviation in measurement. In both methods, principle component analysis is used to reduce the dimensionality of the data to be processed, and thus leads to lower computation complexities. The results of the proposed detection methods on the IEEE standard test systems demonstrate effectiveness of both schemes.