Vulnerability Assessment of Large-scale Power Systems to False Data Injection Attacks

This paper studies the vulnerability of large-scale power systems to false data injection (FDI) attacks through their physical consequences. An attacker-defender bi-level linear program (ADBLP) can be used to determine the worst-case consequences of FDI attacks aiming to maximize the physical power flow on a target line. This ADBLP can be transformed into a single-level mixed-integer linear program (MILP), but it is numerically intractable for power systems with a large number of buses and branches. In this paper, a modified Benders' decomposition algorithm is proposed to solve the ADBLP on large power systems without converting it to the MILP. Of more general interest, the proposed algorithm can be used to solve any ADBLP. Vulnerability of the IEEE 118-bus system and the Polish system with 2383 buses to FDI attacks is assessed using the proposed algorithm.