A Control-Chart-Based Detector for Small-Amount Electricity Theft (SET) Attack in Smart Grids

For achieving the goal of two-way communication and power flows, smart grids are integrated with much state-of-the-art hardware and software. However, these newly added components also introduce a lot of vulnerabilities into the power systems, which results in that malicious users can launch various cyber–physical attacks to steal electricity. The existing electricity theft detection techniques suffer from an implicit assumption that malicious users tamper with smart meter readings to values much less than their actual electricity consumptions. These are called large-amount electricity theft (LET) attacks. Nevertheless, in the real world, some malicious users may be cautious enough to deliberately launch small-amount electricity theft (SET) attacks, where smart meter readings are manipulated to numbers slightly lower than the actual values, mainly to escape detection. To address this limitation, we propose a detector that is able to deal with both LET and SET attacks effectively. This detector applies a cumulative sum (CUSUM) control chart and a Shewhart control chart together to analyze users’ reported readings and measurements of a central observer meter. It consists of an electricity theft detection phase, which aims to detect the existence of LET/SET attacks timely and a malicious user identification phase, which aims to identify malicious users exactly. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed detector, and the results show that it has good performance in terms of several metrics.