6.1. Quickest Change Detection
Quickest change detection (QCD) is concerned with detecting a possible change in the distribution of a monitored observation sequence [
61], indicative of an anomaly in a stochastic environment. The general goal in QCD theory is to design algorithms to detect these changes with the smallest detection delay possible, subject to a constraint on false alarm.
Three main ingredients are needed in the QCD problem [
62]: an observed stochastic process
, a change time
at which the statistical properties of the process undergo change, and a decision maker that declares a change time
based on observations of the stochastic process. False alarm is defined as an instance of the decision maker declaring a change before the change occurs:
. The constraint on false alarm follows from the Neyman-Pearson hypothesis testing formulation [
63] which is foundational to the QCD problem.
The Neyman-Pearson Lemma [
64] establishes the optimal test for binary hypothesis testing, involving the null (
) and alternate (
) hypotheses. For a single observation
X:
H0: X has pdf p.
H1: X has pdf q.
Then comparing the
likelihood ratio to a threshold value is the most powerful test in terms of deciding which hypothesis is true while minimizing missed detection subject to a constraint on false alarm [
65]. The likelihood ratio plays a fundamental role in recursive sequential change detection algorithms such as Page’s CUSUM [
66] and the Shiryaev-Roberts procedure [
67], each of which enjoy optimality properties in terms of minimizing false alarm and detection delay
. These properties are given proper discussion in [
61].
QCD approaches have shown great promise for power system anomaly detection applications, such as line outage detection and identification [
68,
69,
70]. QCD has further application in detecting changes in the state estimation error, which has been proposed for fault and FDIA detection. The first QCD approach for state estimation FDIA detection implemented an adaptive approach using the CUSUM statistic
where
is the observed stochastic process and
L the log-likelihood ratio. Sample plots of a subtle change in a Gaussian observation process along with the corresponding CUSUM statistic are included in
Figure 1.
Because the exact form of the post-change distribution
q is not known, the authors in [
71,
72] use a Rao test based approximation [
73] of the generalized likelihood ratio test for CUSUM-based FDIA detection. A low-complexity Orthogonal Matching Pursuit CUSUM (OMP-CUSUM) approach in [
74] accounts for the unknown change distribution by maximizing the cumulative log-likelihood ratio to detect FDIAs that are sparse (i.e., only a small number of meters are assumed accessible to the attacker).
Both centralized and distributed CUSUM-based approaches for FDIA detection are proposed in [
75], replacing the unknown parameters of the post-change distribution with their maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs). For the centralized case, the observed stochastic process of interest is the projection of the measurement vector on the orthogonal Jacobian space component
. This is expressed as
, where
is the previously defined linear projection matrix. The distributed case partitions the power system into areas and estimates the state variables through the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) [
76], where each area
i has its own observed process
. These approaches outperformed the adaptive-CUSUM approach in [
71,
72] due in part to improved detection of FDIAs with negative and larger elements of the attack vector
.
The work in [
77] incorporates a Kalman filter approach and seperately evaluates DoS attacks and FDIAs. Better detection performance was observed for stealth FDIAs in particular, in which perfect system topology knowledge allows an attacker to inject false data along the column space of
. Four Kalman filtering techniques in [
52] were evaluated using nonparametric CUSUM, in which both pre and post-change distributions
p and
q are unknown. Hybrid FDIA/jamming attacks are assessed for the Kalman filter CUSUM-based detector in [
78]. The distinction between persistent and non-persistent attacks was made as well. Most CUSUM-based detectors assume persistence in the change of the observed stochastic process, and so an intermittent attack series could be designed to increase detection delay. Thus the Generalized Shewhart Test, which can detect significant increases in
L, is presented as a countermeasure against stealthy, non-persistent FDIAs. A relaxed generalized CUSUM (RGCUSUM) algorithm is presented in [
79] for FDIA detection. A relaxation on maximizing the post-change likelihood over the unknown parameters yielded a more computationally efficient algorithm than its generalized CUSUM counterpart. A Normalized Rao CUSUM-based detector with a time-varying dynamic model was employed in [
80] to better distinguish between FDIA and sudden load changes.
The work in [
81] also assesses the Shiryaev-Roberts (SR) procedure along with CUSUM for change detection. In contrast to CUSUM, the optimality of the SR procedure pertains to detecting
at a distant time horizon [
82,
83]. The SR procedure is defined recursively as
Further, modified CUSUM and SR procedure algorithms [
84] are employed in the same work as evaluation benchmarks for a so-called DeepQCD algorithm for online cyber-attack detection, which uses deep recurrent neural networks to detect changes in transient cases and with autocorrelated observations.
6.2. AI Approaches
FDIA detection can be framed as a binary classification problem in which the measurement vector
is determined to be either normal (negative class) or anomalous (positive class). One of the first to use semi-supervised and supervised learning for FDIA detection [
85] explored perceptron, support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (
k-NN), and sparse logistic regression algorithms for supervised learning. Semi-supervised learning, in which unlabelled test data in incorporated in training, was explored with semi-supervised SVMs. Many valuable takeaways were garnered from this work, including considerations of power system size and and computational complexity, however stealthy FDIAs were not considered. An Extended Nearest Neighbors (ENN) algorithm was proposed in [
86] to better handle the imbalanced data problem, (i.e., cases in which the number of negative class samples greatly exceeds or is significantly less than the number of positive class samples). Classification performance was then compared to SVM and
k-NN algorithms. The work in [
87] used a method based on the margin-setting algorithm, typically used in image processing applications, in which hypersphere decision boundaries were formed through labeled PMU time-series data. The MSA approached yielded superior classification performance compared to standard artificial neural networks (ANN) and SVM.
Unsupervised principal component analysis (PCA) showed utility in the construction of stealthy and blind FDIAs as well and in developing robust detection methods [
88,
89]. PCA is again employed in [
90] as a preprocessing step to project higher dimensional correlated measurement data to a lower dimension, removing correlation between data and magnifying the distance between normal and anomalous measurements. For performance comparison, the authors implemented a supervised distributed ADMM-based SVM, which could only outperform the PCA-based anomaly detection when the training set was large. Mahalanobis distance based ensemble detection methods demonstrated success for FDIA detection in [
91,
92,
93,
94], including in high-fidelity real-time simulation.
Reinforcement learning (RL) based QCD approaches are explored in [
81,
95]. The QCD problem can be formulated as a case of optimal stopping, in which a decision to exercise must be made to minimize cost [
96,
97]. In QCD, this is understood as declaring a stop time
at a cost relative to the actual stop time
. For the Markov Decision Process (MDP) component of RL, one can either seek to maximize reward or minimize cost [
98]. Two components for the cost are constructed [
96]: one for continuing (associated with missed detection) and one for stopping (associated with false alarm). The authors in [
95] use a model-free state–action–reward–state–action (SARSA) approach to learn the expected future cost for each state-action pair in a
Q-table. The authors opt for a quantization scheme for learning when faced with the continuous observation space. Because the actual change time
is a hidden state, a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) formulation is used. This RL approach significantly outperformed the Euclidean [
56] and cosine-similarity metric [
99] based detectors in terms of minimizing mean probability of false alarm and detection delay for various cyber-attack types, including hybridFDI/jamming, DoS, and network topology attacks.
Neural network and deep learning approaches also show promise for malicious and standard bad data detection. A Deep Belief Network based classifier is proposed in [
100] using Conditional Gaussian-Bernoulli Restricted Boltzmann Machines in the hopes of revealing higher-dimensional temporal features of stealthy FDIAs. The temporal correlation between measurements to the state estimator is analyzed through Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) for FDIA detection in [
101]. A nonlinear autoregressive exogenous (NARX) model configuration for ANNs is explored in [
102] for stealthy optimized FDIA detection. The authors in [
103] consider a limited set of target labels for attacked measurement data, an example of semi-supervised learning. Autoencoders, used for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction, are integrated into a generative adversarial network. The framework compensates for the limited labelled data set by using two neural networks: one generative, responsible for creating fake samples, and other discriminative, responsible for distinguishing between real and generated samples.