Modeling and Defending Advanced Metering Infrastructure Subjected to Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a critical and fundamental component of smart grids. Cyber security of AMI thus has direct implications to smart grid's secure and reliable operations. This paper establishes analytical models for studying AMI system's robustness with presence of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. This paper firstly proposes a state transition model for individual smart meter nodes and data collector nodes in an AMI communication network; based on this, a dynamic differential system is formulated to describe the network's state evolution. We analyze the dynamic differential system's stability under DDoS attacks and propose a defending strategy, which optimally allocate defending resources in the AMI network, aiming at mitigating the DDoS's threaten with minimum defending loss and cost. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the proposed method under different AMI network topologies.