A General Framework for the Assessment of Power System Vulnerability to Malicious Attacks

Abstract

The protection and safe operations of power systems heavily rely on the identification of the causes of damage and service disruption. This article presents a general framework for the assessment of power system vulnerability to malicious attacks. The concept of susceptibility to an attack is employed to quantitatively evaluate the degree of exposure of the system and its components to intentional offensive actions. A scenario with two agents having opposing objectives is proposed, i.e., a defender having multiple alternatives of protection strategies for system elements, and an attacker having multiple alternatives of attack strategies against different combinations of system elements. The defender aims to minimize the system susceptibility to the attack, subject to budget constraints; on the other hand, the attacker aims to maximize the susceptibility. The problem is defined as a zero-sum game between the defender and the attacker. The assumption that the interests of the attacker and the defender are opposite makes it irrelevant whether or not the defender shows the strategy he/she will use. Thus, the approaches "leader-follower game" or "simultaneous game" do not provide differences as far as the results are concerned. The results show an example of such a situation, and the von Neumann theorem is applied to find the (mixed) equilibrium strategies of the attacker and of the defender.

A Review of Game Theory Application Research in Safety Management

“…Attia et al (2016) applied information and communication technology to smart grid, and proposed an end-to-end smart grid architecture for the first time, including main production, transmission, distribution, smart grid and network safety management personnel. Through the establishment of Bayesian game model, green electric source optimization is integrated into the electric grid, so as to improve the safety of the whole electric system; Piccinelli et al (2017) proposed a general framework to evaluate the vulnerability of smart grid system to malicious attacks, constructed a zero-sum game between defenders and attackers, and applied von Neumann theorem to find the balance strategy between attackers and defenders, so as to improve the stability of electric system. Some scholars think about how to improve the Electrical safety based on the type of electric generation.…”

Adversarial Risk Analysis to Allocate Optimal Defense Resources for Protecting Cyber–Physical Systems from Cyber Attacks

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Joint optimization of mission abort and protective device selection policies for multistate systems

“…As one of the risk control methods of safety‐critical systems, mission abort has been widely applied in various fields. For safety‐critical engineering systems such as spacecrafts (Majewicz et al., 2020), submarines and power systems (Piccinelli et al., 2017; Qiu et al., 2020; Qiu et al., 2021; Trakas et al., 2019) whose survival attains greater priority over mission completion, aborting the mission in advance proves to be an effective way to enhance system survivability. To be specific, when safety‐critical systems meet some given deterioration conditions, their missions will be terminated and a rescue procedure will be initiated which can be found commonly in many domains.…”