{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,2]],"date-time":"2026-04-02T17:15:59Z","timestamp":1775150159905,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":48,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"10","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,20]],"date-time":"2024-05-20T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1716163200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/100009391","name":"Deanship of Research and Graduate Studies at the University of Tabuk","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["0270-1443-S"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["0270-1443-S"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100009391","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Smart power grids suffer from electricity theft cyber-attacks, where malicious consumers compromise their smart meters (SMs) to downscale the reported electricity consumption readings. This problem costs electric utility companies worldwide considerable financial burdens and threatens power grid stability. Therefore, several machine learning (ML)-based solutions have been proposed to detect electricity theft; however, they have limitations. First, most existing works employ supervised learning that requires the availability of labeled datasets of benign and malicious electricity usage samples. Unfortunately, this approach is not practical due to the scarcity of real malicious electricity usage samples. Moreover, training a supervised detector on specific cyberattack scenarios results in a robust detector against those attacks, but it might fail to detect new attack scenarios. Second, although a few works investigated anomaly detectors for electricity theft, none of the existing works addressed consumers\u2019 privacy. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a comprehensive federated learning (FL)-based deep anomaly detection framework tailored for practical, reliable, and privacy-preserving energy theft detection. In our proposed framework, consumers train local deep autoencoder-based detectors on their private electricity usage data and only share their trained detectors\u2019 parameters with an EUC aggregation server to iteratively build a global anomaly detector. Our extensive experimental results not only demonstrate the superior performance of our anomaly detector compared to the supervised detectors but also the capability of our proposed FL-based anomaly detector to accurately detect zero-day attacks of electricity theft while preserving consumers\u2019 privacy.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s24103236","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,20]],"date-time":"2024-05-20T06:31:58Z","timestamp":1716186718000},"page":"3236","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":34,"title":["Deep Anomaly Detection Framework Utilizing Federated Learning for Electricity Theft Zero-Day Cyberattacks"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"24","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3240-1955","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ali","family":"Alshehri","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, University of Tabuk, Tabuk 71491, Saudi Arabia"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8986-001X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mahmoud M.","family":"Badr","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Network and Computer Security, College of Engineering, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Utica, NY 13502, USA"},{"name":"Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at Shoubra, Benha University, Cairo 11629, Egypt"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5153-8693","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mohamed","family":"Baza","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8799-9448","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hani","family":"Alshahrani","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Najran University, Najran 61441, Saudi Arabia"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,20]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Goudarzi, A., Ghayoor, F., Waseem, M., Fahad, S., and Traore, I. 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