Black Box Attack on Machine Learning Assisted Wide Area Monitoring and Protection Systems

The applications for wide area monitoring, protection, and control systems (WAMPC) at the control center, help with providing resilient, efficient, and secure operation of the transmission system of the smart grid. The increased proliferation of phasor measurement units (PMUs) in this space has inspired many prudent applications to assist in the process of decision making in the control centers. Machine learning (ML) based decision support systems have become viable with the availability of abundant high-resolution wide area operational PMU data. We propose a deep neural network (DNN) based supervisory protection and event diagnosis system and demonstrate that it works with very high degree of confidence. The system introduces a supervisory layer that processes the data streams collected from PMUs and detects disturbances in the power systems that may have gone unnoticed by the local monitoring and protection system. Then, we investigate compromise of the insights of this ML based supervisory control by crafting adversaries that corrupt the PMU data via minimal coordinated manipulation and identification of the spatio-temporal regions in the multi-dimensional PMU data in a way that the DNN classifier makes wrong event predictions.