Abstract
Smart grids are complex cyber-physical systems that incorporate smart devices' communication capabilities into the grid to enable remote management and the control of power systems. However, this integration reveals numerous SCADA system flaws, which could compromise security goals and pose severe cyber threats to the smart grid. In conventional works, various attack detection methodologies are developed to strengthen the security of smart grid SCADA systems. However, they have several issues with complexity, slow training speed, time consumption, and inaccurate prediction outcomes. The purpose of this work is to develop a novel security framework for protecting smart grid SCADA systems against harmful network vulnerabilities or intrusions. Therefore, the proposed work is motivated to develop an intelligent meta-heuristic-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) mechanism for securing IoT-SCADA systems. The proposed framework includes the stages of dataset normalization, Zaire Ebola Search Optimization (ZESO), and Deep Random Kernel Forest Classification (DRKFC). First, the original benchmarking datasets are normalized based on content characterization and category transformation during preprocessing. After that, the ZESO algorithm is deployed to select the most relevant features for increasing the training speed and accuracy of attack detection. Moreover, the DRKFC technique accurately categorizes the normal and attacking data flows based on the optimized feature set. During the evaluation, the performance of the proposed ZESO-DRKFC method is validated and compared in terms of accuracy, detection rate, f1-score, and false acceptance rate. According to the results, it is observed that the ZESO-DRKFC mechanism outperforms other techniques with high accuracy (99%) by precisely spotting intrusions in the smart grid systems.