Mahmoud Nabil

Mohamed I. Ibrahem, Mahmoud Nabil, Mostafa M. Fouda et al.

In advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), smart meters (SMs) are installed at the consumer side to send fine-grained power consumption readings periodically to the system operator (SO) for load monitoring, energy management, billing, etc. However, fraudulent consumers launch electricity theft cyber-attacks by reporting false readings to reduce their bills illegally. These attacks do not only cause financial losses but may also degrade the grid performance because the readings are used for grid management. To identify these attackers, the existing schemes employ machine-learning models using the consumers' fine-grained readings, which violates the consumers' privacy by revealing their lifestyle. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme that enables the SO to detect electricity theft, compute bills, and monitor load while preserving the consumers' privacy. The idea is that SMs encrypt their readings using functional encryption, and the SO uses the ciphertexts to (i) compute the bills following dynamic pricing approach, (ii) monitor the grid load, and (iii) evaluate a machine-learning model to detect fraudulent consumers, without being able to learn the individual readings to preserve consumers' privacy. We adapted a functional encryption scheme so that the encrypted readings are aggregated for billing and load monitoring and only the aggregated value is revealed to the SO. Also, we exploited the inner-product operations on encrypted readings to evaluate a machine-learning model to detect fraudulent consumers. Real dataset is used to evaluate our scheme, and our evaluations indicate that our scheme is secure and can detect fraudulent consumers accurately with low communication and computation overhead.

Mahmoud Nabil, Muhammad Ismail, Mohamed Mahmoud et al.

Modern smart grids rely on advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) networks for monitoring and billing purposes. However, such an approach suffers from electricity theft cyberattacks. Different from the existing research that utilizes shallow, static, and customer-specific-based electricity theft detectors, this paper proposes a generalized deep recurrent neural network (RNN)-based electricity theft detector that can effectively thwart these cyberattacks. The proposed model exploits the time series nature of the customers' electricity consumption to implement a gated recurrent unit (GRU)-RNN, hence, improving the detection performance. In addition, the proposed RNN-based detector adopts a random search analysis in its learning stage to appropriately fine-tune its hyper-parameters. Extensive test studies are carried out to investigate the detector's performance using publicly available real data of 107,200 energy consumption days from 200 customers. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed detector compared with state-of-the-art electricity theft detectors.

Mahmoud Nabil

Random Projection is a foundational research topic that connects a bunch of machine learning algorithms under a similar mathematical basis. It is used to reduce the dimensionality of the dataset by projecting the data points efficiently to a smaller dimensions while preserving the original relative distance between the data points. In this paper, we are intended to explain random projection method, by explaining its mathematical background and foundation, the applications that are currently adopting it, and an overview on its current research perspective.