Multi-Layered Coordinated Countermeasures for DC Microgrid Clusters Under Man in the Middle Attack

This paper aims to investigate the adversarial effects of man/machine-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks on interconnected direct current microgrid (MG) clusters, their detection and countermeasures for the first time. Therefore, a novel multi-layered attack recovery (ARF) scheme coordinated with state reconstruction has been formulated in the higher layers to identify such mishaps and provide cyber-resiliency to the MG power system operation at various levels of the hierarchical structure. The proposed countermeasures are based on synchronisation errors of the consensus variables and aid in preventive isolation of the healthy MG clusters or converters, thereby avoiding events which could potentially cause cascading effects. Its efficacy is demonstrated through theoretical analysis and extensive time domain simulations in MATLAB/Simulink under various scenarios of unidirectional and bidirectional MITM alongwith communication latencies. Lastly, controller hardware-in-loop (cHIL) implementation is employed to validate the security of real-time operations of MGs against stealthy MITM attacks.