Data Integrity Attacks Against Outage Management Systems

In developed countries, the electric grid and the Internet are societal necessities. In developing countries, both have grown rapidly during the past few decades. The operational benefits from adding digital and communications overlays to the power grid and the resulting coevolution of the two technologies have expose the power systems to potential cyberattacks. The outage management system (OMS) is a crucial component of outage restoration and reliability planning. In this article, we propose a new research topic on data integrity attacks to OMSs. We discuss the scenarios of such attacks, their consequences, and the means to detect and mitigate the attacks. We relate this proposed research topic to the recent progress in three areas, state estimation, load forecasting, and outage prediction. Finally, we discuss the practical challenges and future research directions.