FedDetect: A Novel Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Framework for Energy Theft Detection in Smart Grid

In smart grids, a major challenge is how to effectively utilize consumers’ energy consumption data while preserving security and privacy. In this article, we tackle this challenging issue and focus on energy theft detection, which is very important for smart grids. Specifically, we note that most existing energy theft detection schemes are centralized, which may be unscalable, and more importantly, may be very difficult to protect data privacy. To address this issue, we propose a novel privacy-preserving federated learning framework for energy theft detection, namely, FedDetect. In our framework, we consider a federated learning system that consists of a data center (DC), a control center (CC), and multiple detection stations. In this system, each detection station (DTS) can only observe data from local consumers, which can use a local differential privacy (LDP) scheme to process their data to preserve privacy. To facilitate the training of the model, we design a secure protocol so that detection stations can send encrypted training parameters to the CC and the DC, which then use homomorphic encryption to calculate the aggregated parameters and return updated model parameters to detection stations. In our study, we prove the security of the proposed protocol with solid security analysis. To detect energy theft, we design a deep learning model based on the state-of-the-art temporal convolutional network (TCN). Finally, we conduct extensive data-driven experiments using a real-energy consumption data set. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed federated learning framework can achieve high accuracy of detection with a smaller computation overhead.