FlowGuard: Flow Matching for Identity-Independent Detection of Data-Free Model Stealing Attacks on Energy System Intrusion Detection Systems

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 2 Jun 2026] FlowGuard: Flow Matching for Identity-Independent Detection of Data-Free Model Stealing Attacks on Energy System Intrusion Detection Systems Maxime Schwarzer, Laurin Holz, Tobias Huerten, Johannes Loevenich, Thies Moehlenhof, Roberto Rigolin F. Lopes, Veit Hagenmeyer Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) deployed in energy infrastructure are vulnerable to model theft attacks, which allow adversaries to create evasive traffic offline. Current defences against model extraction rely either on identity-bound query monitoring, which is ineffective against distributed attackers (Sybil), or on prediction poisoning through soft-label perturbation, which is inapplicable to hard-label IDS deployments. Therefore, we propose FlowGuard, an identity-independent defence based on flow matching that classifies incoming queries as out-of-distribution (OOD) prior to IDS processing. This approach exploits the fact that queries generated synthetically for data-free model stealing attacks occupy a lower-dimensional manifold than real network traffic. This results in measurably lower log-likelihoods when using a Continuous Normalizing Flow that has been trained on legitimate data. We evaluate our method against PRADA and FDINet using MAZE and DisGUIDE attacks in single-client and distributed (100-client Sybil) settings. While PRADA's detection rate dropped to 0% when the distribution changed, our defence maintained a stable detection rate across both settings without relying on identity information. We discuss the scope and limitations of the approach, and outline potential applications to data-dependent attacks. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.03430 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.03430v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.03430 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Maxime Schwarzer [view email] [v1] Tue, 2 Jun 2026 10:18:45 UTC (252 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)