A Covert Electricity-Theft Cyber-Attack against Machine Learning-Based Detection Models

Publisher:
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Publication Type:
Journal Article
Citation:
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 2022, 18, (11), pp. 7824-7833
Issue Date:
2022-01-01
Full metadata record
The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in modern networked smart homes brings various advantages. However, smart homes are vulnerable to many cyberattacks, and the most striking one is energy theft. Researchers have developed many countermeasures, fostered by advanced machine learning (ML) techniques. Nevertheless, recent advances are not robust enough in practice, partially due to the vulnerabilities of ML algorithms. In this paper, we present a covert electricity theft strategy through mimicking normal consumption patterns. Such attack is almost impossible to be detected by existing solutions as the manipulated data have little deviation against honest usage records. To address this threat, we initially identify and define two levels of consumption deviations: home-level and interpersonal-level, respectively. Then, we propose a feature extraction method and develop a novel detection model based on deep learning. Extensive experiments show that the presented attack could evade existing mainstream detectors and the proposed countermeasure outperforms existing leading methods.
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