Unidentifiable Attacks in Electric Power Systems

Abstract

Abstract-The electric power grid is a crucial infrastructure in our society and is always a target of malicious users and attackers. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of unidentifiable attack, in which the control center cannot identify the attack even though it detects its presence. Thus, the control center cannot obtain deterministic state estimates, since there may have several feasible cases and the control center cannot simply favor one over the others. Furthermore, we present algorithms to enumerate all feasible cases under an unidentifiable attack, and propose an optimization strategy from the perspective of the control center to deal with an unidentifiable attack. We briefly evaluate and validate our enumerating algorithms and optimization strategy.

Cyber Risk Assessment of Transmission Lines in Smart Grids

“…The upper level of the above bilevel problem simulates the attacker's attacking strategy, which is to determine the injected false data ∆D that maximizes the potential flow of line k in Equation (3). The lower level simulates the system operator's operation strategy, which is essentially an SCED problem that minimizes the total generation cost and load shedding cost in Equation (9).…”

“…The sparse optimization technique was used to construct the corresponding sparse attacking vector. Qin et al [3] introduced the concept of unidentifiable attack, where the control center can detect the existence of false data but has no way to identify which meters are attacked. Xie et al [4] investigated the impacts of false data on the real-time Locational…”

Preserving secondary users' privacy in cognitive radio networks

“…This dilemma exists in many areas, such as smarter metering and vehicular electronic tolling. Privacypreserving solutions have been proposed in smart metering [10], vehicular tolling [11], [12], and other topics [13]- [15], and can potentially be applied to some attacks in smart grid and social networks [16]- [18].…”

Defending against Unidentifiable Attacks in Electric Power Grids

“…4. We improve on [7] by considering from the view of an attacker. As an attacker, he is interested in finding good attack regions to attack such that the number of meters he needs to compromise to launch an unidentifiable attack is minimized.…”

“…5. As another improvement on [7], we propose an algorithm that a control center with limited resource can use to identify the meters they should verify during an unidentifiable attack. 6.…”