Neural Network-Based Detection and Multi-Class Classification of FDI Attacks in Smart Grid Home Energy Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a machine learning framework utilizing neural networks to detect and classify false data injection attacks in smart grid home energy systems, improving security and resilience at the residential level.

Contribution

It presents a novel combination of ANN and Bidirectional LSTM models for real-time detection and classification of FDIAs using synthetic energy consumption data.

Findings

ANN effectively detects FDIAs in real-time

Bidirectional LSTM accurately classifies attack types

Models demonstrate high effectiveness on synthetic data

Abstract

False Data Injection Attacks (FDIAs) pose a significant threat to smart grid infrastructures, particularly Home Area Networks (HANs), where real-time monitoring and control are highly adopted. Owing to the comparatively less stringent security controls and widespread availability of HANs, attackers view them as an attractive entry point to manipulate aggregated demand patterns, which can ultimately propagate and disrupt broader grid operations. These attacks undermine the integrity of smart meter data, enabling malicious actors to manipulate consumption values without activating conventional alarms, thereby creating serious vulnerabilities across both residential and utility-scale infrastructures. This paper presents a machine learning-based framework for both the detection and classification of FDIAs using residential energy data. A real-time detection is provided by the lightweight Artificial Neural Network (ANN), which works by using the most vital features of energy consumption, cost, and time context. For the classification of different attack types, a Bidirectional LSTM is trained to recognize normal, trapezoidal, and sigmoid attack shapes through learning sequential dependencies in the data. A synthetic time-series dataset was generated to emulate realistic household behaviour. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed models are effective in identifying and classifying FDIAs, offering a scalable solution for enhancing grid resilience at the edge. This work contributes toward building intelligent, data-driven defence mechanisms that strengthen smart grid cybersecurity from residential endpoints.