Evasive attacks against autoencoder-based cyberattack detection systems in power systems

The digital transformation process of power systems towards smart grids is resulting in improved reliability, efficiency and situational awareness at the expense of increased cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Given the availability of large volumes of smart grid data, machine learning-based methods are considered an effective way to improve cybersecurity posture. Despite the unquestionable merits of machine learning approaches for cybersecurity enhancement, they represent a component of the cyberattack surface that is vulnerable, in particular, to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we examine the robustness of autoencoder-based cyberattack detection systems in smart grids to adversarial attacks. A novel iterative-based method is first proposed to craft adversarial attack samples. Then, it is demonstrated that an attacker with white-box access to the autoencoder-based cyberattack detection systems can successfully craft evasive samples using the proposed method. The results indicate that naive initial adversarial seeds cannot be employed to craft successful adversarial attacks shedding insight on the complexity of designing adversarial attacks against autoencoder-based cyberattack detection systems in smart grids.