Adversarial Purification for Data-Driven Power System Event Classifiers
  with Diffusion Models
Yuanbin Cheng Koji Yamashita Jim Follum Nanpeng Yu
The global deployment of the phasor measurement units (PMUs) enables
real-time monitoring of the power system, which has stimulated considerable
research into machine learning-based models for event detection and
classification. However, recent studies reveal that machine learning-based
methods are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can fool the event
classifiers by adding small perturbations to the raw PMU data. To mitigate the
threats posed by adversarial attacks, research on defense strategies is
urgently needed. This paper proposes an effective adversarial purification
method based on the diffusion model to counter adversarial attacks on the
machine learning-based power system event classifier. The proposed method
includes two steps: injecting noise into the PMU data; and utilizing a
pre-trained neural network to eliminate the added noise while simultaneously
removing perturbations introduced by the adversarial attacks. The proposed
adversarial purification method significantly increases the accuracy of the
event classifier under adversarial attacks while satisfying the requirements of
real-time operations. In addition, the theoretical analysis reveals that the
proposed diffusion model-based adversarial purification method decreases the
distance between the original and compromised PMU data, which reduces the
impacts of adversarial attacks. The empirical results on a large-scale
real-world PMU dataset validate the effectiveness and computational efficiency
of the proposed adversarial purification method.