Power flow cyber attacks and perturbation-based defense

In this paper, we present two contributions to false data injection attacks and mitigation in electric power systems. First, we introduce a method of creating unobservable attacks on the AC power flow equations. The attack strategy details how an adversary can launch a stealthy attack to achieve a goal. Then, we introduce a proactive defense strategy that is capable of detecting attacks. The defense strategy introduces known perturbations by deliberately probing the system in a specific, structured manner. We show that the proposed approach, under certain conditions, is able to detect the presence of false data injection attacks, as well the attack locations and information about the manipulated data values.

I. Introduction

False data injection attacks in the power grid have recently begun to attract wide-spread interest. The role of data in power systems analysis, and hence the importance of studying false data injection attacks, is understood by considering the data pipeline from the measurement devices in the field to the point-of-end-use applications. Devices such as relays and remote terminal units (RTUs) perform the physical data acquisition and are connected through a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. Communication networks then transmit this data which is ultimately processed by power applications, such as those in an energy management system (EMS) at a control center. A taxonomy of dependencies between the communications and the physical power infrastructures is given in [1].