Interpretable Cyber-Physical Attack Detection in Smart Grids: A Leakage-Controlled Multi-Testbed Evaluation of Fusion, Robustness, and Observability Limits

arXiv:2611.10950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cyber-physical smart-grid detectors are typically treated as black boxes and validated exclusively on clean, temporally shuffled datasets, which risk overly optimistic performance claims. This work presents a multi-testbed evaluation study built around an interpretable, time-windowed fusion Random Forest, adopting the pessimistic result whenever evaluation protocols disagree. (i) On a public paired cyber-physical dataset, shuffled cross-validation is optimistic: macro-F1 falls from 0.96 to 0.88 +/- 0.06 under rolling-origin temporal evaluation. A topology-free graph convolutional network (GCN) serving as a control confirms that this lightweight model is competitive on these splits. (ii) The adaptive and adaptive-joint feature-space attacks, which are infeasible as realistic grid manipulations, degrade macro-F1 to 0.67 and 0.34, respectively. Adversarial training and randomized smoothing partially restore performance, and a physics-constrained evolution-strategy evasion on the IEEE 14-Bus testbed shows the same vulnerability pattern. (iii) On real IEC-104 traffic, the cyber view reliably catches structural attacks (recall of 0.87 to 0.98) but largely fails on semantic value manipulation (recall of 0.11 to 0.35). An observability taxonomy on the IEEE 14-Bus system reveals that stealthy false data injection defeats all three observation views. (iv) On a full AC weighted least-squares state-estimation testbed, a forecasting-aided temporal test is evaded by slow ramps precisely where a rate-invariant physics-manifold test sustains detection at a common 5% false-alarm target. A full end-to-end evaluation on IEEE 118-Bus confirms the ordering but bounds its strength: the manifold test detects every trial down to 0.05 degree/step and 0.48 at 0.02 degree/step, against 0.14 for the temporal test. All code and benchmarks are released.