Towards Resilient and Secure Smart Grids against PMU Adversarial Attacks: A Deep Learning-Based Robust Data Engineering Approach

In an attempt to provide reliable power distribution, smart grids integrate monitoring, communication, and control technologies for better energy consumption and management. As a result of such cyberphysical links, smart grids become vulnerable to cyberattacks, highlighting the significance of detecting and monitoring such attacks to uphold their security and dependability. Accordingly, the use of phasor measurement units (PMUs) enables real-time monitoring and control, providing informed-decisions data and making it possible to sense abnormal behavior indicative of cyberattacks. Similar to the ways it dominates other fields, deep learning has brought a lot of interest to the realm of cybersecurity. A common formulation for this issue is learning under data complexity, unavailability, and drift connected to increasing cardinality, imbalance brought on by data scarcity, and fast change in data characteristics, respectively. To address these challenges, this paper suggests a deep learning monitoring method based on robust feature engineering, using PMU data with greater accuracy, even within the presence of cyberattacks. The model is initially investigated using condition monitoring data to identify various disturbances in smart grids free from adversarial attacks. Then, a minimally disruptive experiment using adversarial attack injection with various reality-imitating techniques is conducted, inadvertently damaging the original data and using it to retrain the deep network, boosting its resistance to manipulations. Compared to previous studies, the proposed method demonstrated promising results and better accuracy, making it a potential option for smart grid condition monitoring. The full set of experimental scenarios performed in this study is available online.