Extremely Randomized Trees-Based Scheme for Stealthy Cyber-Attack Detection in Smart Grid Networks

Smart grids have become susceptible to cyber-attacks, being one of the most diversified cyber-physical systems. Measurements collected by the supervisory control and data acquisition system can be compromised by a smart hacker, who can cheat a bad-data detector during state estimation by injecting biased values into the sensor-collected measurements. This may result in false control decisions, compromising the security of the smart grid, and leading to financial losses, power network disruptions, or a combination of both. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel approach to cyber-attacks detection, based on an extremely randomized trees algorithm and kernel principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction. A performance evaluation of the proposed scheme is done by using the standard IEEE 57-bus and 118-bus systems. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme outperforms state-of-art approaches while improving the accuracy in detection of stealth cyber-attacks in smart-grid measurements.