XAI-Based Accurate Anomaly Detector That Is Robust Against Black-Box Evasion Attacks for the Smart Grid

In the realm of smart grids, machine learning (ML) detectors—both binary (or supervised) and anomaly (or unsupervised)—have proven effective in detecting electricity theft (ET). However, binary detectors are designed for specific attacks, making their performance unpredictable against new attacks. Anomaly detectors, conversely, are trained on benign data and identify deviations from benign patterns as anomalies, but their performance is highly sensitive to the selected threshold values. Additionally, ML detectors are vulnerable to evasion attacks, where attackers make minimal changes to malicious samples to evade detection. To address these limitations, we introduce a hybrid anomaly detector that combines a Deep Auto-Encoder (DAE) with a One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM). This detector not only enhances classification performance but also mitigates the threshold sensitivity of the DAE. Furthermore, we evaluate the vulnerability of this detector to benchmark evasion attacks. Lastly, we propose an accurate and robust cluster-based DAE+OCSVM ET anomaly detector, trained using Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) explanations generated by the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) method on consumption readings. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed XAI-based detector achieves superior classification performance and exhibits enhanced robustness against various evasion attacks, including gradient-based and optimization-based methods, under a black-box threat model.