Spatio-temporal Graph-Based Generation and Detection of Adversarial False Data Injection Evasion Attacks in Smart Grids
Abdulrahman Takiddin, Muhammad Ismail, Rachad Atat, Erchin Serpedin
Abstract
Smart power grids are vulnerable to security threats due to their cyber-physical nature. Existing data-driven detectors aim to address simple traditional false data injection attacks (FDIAs). However, adversarial false data injection evasion attacks (FDIEAs) present a more serious threat as adversaries, with different levels of knowledge about the system, inject adversarial samples to circumvent the grid's attack detection system. The robustness of state-of-the-art graph-based detectors has not been investigated against sophisticated FDIEAs. Hence, this article answers three research questions. 1) What is the impact of utilizing spatio-temporal features to craft adversarial samples and how to select attack nodes? 2) How can adversaries generate surrogate spatio-temporal data when they lack knowledge about the system topology? 3) What are the required model characteristics for a robust detection against adversarial FDIEAs? To answer the questions, we examine the robustness of several detectors against five attack cases and conclude the following: 1) Attack generation with full knowledge using spatio-temporal features leads to 5%–26% and 2%–5% higher degradation in detection rate (DR) compared to traditional FDIAs and using temporal features, respectively, whereas centrality analysis-based attack node selection leads to 3%–11% higher degradation in DR compared to a random selection; 2) Stochastic geometry-based graph generation to create surrogate adversarial topologies and samples leads to 3%–13% higher degradation in DR compared to traditional FDIAs; and 3) Adopting an unsupervised spatio-temporal graph autoencoder (STGAE)-based detector enhances the DR by 5<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-$</tex-math></inline-formula>53% compared to benchmark detectors against FDIEAs.