Imposter Attacks Against Data Integrity to Disrupt Power Balancing in Power Systems

Managing and monitoring the telemetered data required for power system controls is a challenge in today’s complex power systems. With so many data sources to monitor, anomaly detection may assist in determining the possibility of cyber-attacks, allowing grid operators to seek support promptly. Anomaly detection is the process of detecting and recognizing uncommon occurrences or incidents (i.e., outliers) and is being employed to detect attacks in various apparatus of the power systems. In the existing literature, authors often considered attack schemes (called stealthy attacks) that can bypass the security alarms in control centers. However, this paper shows that such stealthy attacks can appear as outliers and could be detected using anomaly detection algorithms. Hence, to avoid detection, adversaries can formulate attack sequences, which in addition to bypassing the security alarms, camouflage the compromised quantity within the normal class so that it would not appear as an outlier. Consequently, it will be challenging for the anomaly detectors to identify the attack. We call such undetectable attacks Imposter Attack (IA). Here, a novel technique is proposed to construct the IA, and the same is studied by considering the Automatic Generation Control System of the power systems.