Maintaining Privacy in Smart Grid: Utilizing the Adversarial Attack Paradigm to Counter Nonintrusive Load Monitoring Models

The nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) technique, through its use of various deep neural networks (DNNs), is capable of learning residential appliances’ usage patterns from networked smart meters. However, such learned information may pose a serious privacy risk to users. In response to this privacy concern, in this article, we introduce an innovative adversarial attack. This attack can effectively restrict the NILM models’ ability to dissect power signals while maintaining accurate electricity charges for users. Given that previous adversarial attacks—which are designed for image classifiers and regressors with one-time output—cannot adequately handle NILM models and regressors with time-series output, we formally present the attack objective by leveraging the unique characteristics of regression and time-series data. Our proposed solution algorithms for this attack objective can generate imperceptible perturbations, effectively misleading the prediction of NILM models. To further ensure accurate billing calculation, we refine the attack objective to a practical version and propose a post-process that can iteratively remove the added perturbation in a certain period without compromising attack effectiveness. Experimental results on two real-world datasets, REDD and UK-DALE, demonstrate the effectiveness, transferability, and practicality of our proposed adversarial attack scheme.