Machine-learning detectors for power-system cyberattacks are themselves attack surfaces, and quantum machine learning has been proposed for them. We benchmark fidelity-kernel SVMs and variational classifiers against six tuned classical models on public power-system attack data (Mississippi State/ORNL), across white-box, transfer, decision-based black-box, and poisoning attacks. Our headline finding is methodological: the benchmark's answers are set by the evaluator's choices before the models. Eight choices -- six in the evaluation protocol, two in the tuning the benchmark itself runs -- each reversed or moved a conclusion at fixed models. The largest is the split: the row-level protocol scores 0.905 macro-F1 where holding whole source files out leaves 0.594, and in the capped matched-dimensionality regime the quantum arm sits within noise of chance with the classical arm 0.024 above it. A fidelity kernel looks most robust until attacked directly (retention 0.886 to 0.064); a mis-fitted surrogate manufactures a 10x asymmetry; an unseeded black-box attack moves 75% between restarts. A positive control explains the accuracy null: the labels, not the pipeline. We give the control that catches each choice and release the seeded benchmark.
Hannan Chen, Roshni Anna Jacob, Jie Zhangcs.CR cs.LG eess.SY
Cyberattack detection in electric vehicle charging infrastructure is complicated by legitimate post-activation revisions to requested energy and departure time. Charging manipulation attacks can exploit the same interface and variables; therefore, detecting a request change alone does not establish malicious intent. This paper develops a leakage-controlled session-level benchmark that preserves the ordered inputs of real Adaptive Charging Network (ACN) sessions and models legitimate revisions as normal behavior. A fixed pool keeps each generated attack in its source session's split and contains six physically motivated attacks and their coordinated variants. We compare 22 profile-only, transition-aware, and context-stratified model families under common source-grouped folds, attack data, and operating constraints. The proposed Dual-Branch Masked-Autoencoder (Masked-AE) Transition Boost model evaluates whether the current request is normal and whether its producing transition resembles an observed benign update. Its state branch combines masked reconstruction with a radial-basis-function one-class support boundary, while its transition branch combines masked reconstruction with shrinkage covariance distance. Source-grouped five-fold cross-validation selects complete configurations under explicit overall-normal and benign-update acceptance constraints; disjoint normal data then calibrate the final threshold before one test evaluation. The developed dual-branch model provides the strongest robust validation performance while detecting malicious request manipulations without learning to reject legitimate user choices.
High-dimensional feature representations are widely used in machine learning-based cyberattack detection systems. However, they increase computational complexity and may hinder deployment in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we investigate feature compression techniques for cyberattack classification by comparing two dimensionality reduction approaches: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Predictive Coding (LPC). Compressed feature representations with varying dimensionalities are generated and evaluated across several classification models. Experimental analysis demonstrates that PCA preserves classification performance even under aggressive compression. On the other hand, LPC provides competitive predictive representations with slightly larger performance degradation. The results show that substantial reductions in feature dimensionality can be achieved with minimal impact on classification accuracy, highlighting the potential of lightweight feature compression for efficient cybersecurity analytics.