Local Cyber-physical Attack with Leveraging Detection in Smart Grid
Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica（中央研究院資訊科技創新研究中心）；Engineering Product Development, Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学工程产品开发）；Institute of Communications Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University（国立中山大学通讯工程学系）
A well-designed attack in the power system can cause an initial failure and then results in large-scale cascade failure. Several works have discussed power system attack through false data injection, line-maintaining attack, and line-removing attack. However, the existing methods need to continuously attack the system for a long time, and, unfortunately, the performance cannot be guaranteed if the system states vary. To overcome this issue, we consider a new type of attack strategy called combinational attack which masks a line-outage at one position but misleads the control center on line outage at another position. Therefore, the topology information in the control center is interfered by our attack. We also offer a procedure of selecting the vulnerable lines of its kind. The proposed method can effectively and continuously deceive the control center in identifying the actual position of line-outage. The system under attack will be exposed to increasing risks as the attack continuously. Simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed attack strategy.
In concept, a smart charging management system (SCMS) optimizes the charging of plug-in vehicles (PEVs) and provides various grid services including voltage control, frequency regulation, peak shaving, renewable energy integration support, spinning reserve, and emergency demand response. These functionalities largely depend upon data collected from various entities such as PEVs, electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE), service providers, and utilities. SCMS can be susceptible to both cyber and physical threats (e.g. man-in-the-middle attack, data intrigued attack, denial of charging, physical…
This paper presents a hybrid data-driven physics model-based framework for real time monitoring in smart grids. As the power grid transitions to the use of smart grid technology, it's real time monitoring becomes more vulnerable to cyber attacks like false data injections (FDI). Although smart grids cyber-physical security has an extensive scope, this paper focuses on FDI attacks, which are modeled as bad data. State of the art strategies for FDI detection in real time monitoring rely on physics model-based weighted least squares state estimation solution and statistical tests. This strategy i…
Due to the use of huge number of sensors and the increasing use of communication networks, cyber-physical systems (CPS) are becoming vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The ever-increasing complexity of CPS bring up the need for data-driven machine learning applications to fill in the need of model creation to describe the system behavior. In this paper, a novel stability condition predictor based on cascaded feedforward neural network is proposed. The proposed method aims to identify anomaly due to cyber or physical disturbances as an early sign of instability. The proposed neural network utilizes c…
Modern smart grid systems are heavily dependent on Information and Communication Technology, and this dependency makes them prone to cyberattacks. The occurrence of a cyberattack has increased in recent years resulting in substantial damage to power systems. For a reliable and stable operation, cyber protection, control, and detection techniques are becoming essential. Automated detection of cyberattacks with high accuracy is a challenge. To address this, we propose a two-layer hierarchical machine learning model having an accuracy of 95.44 % to improve the detection of cyberattacks. The first…
Power systems are large scale cyber-physical critical infrastructure that form the basis of modern society. The reliability and resilience of the grid is dependent on the correct functioning of related subsystems, including computing, communications, and control. The integration is widespread and has a profound impact on the operation, reliability, and efficiency of the grid. Technologies comprising these infrastructure can expose new sources of threats. Mapping these threats to their grid resilience impacts to stop them early requires a timely and detailed view of the entire cyber-physical sy…
Smart Grid Information Security (IS) Functional Requirement
Department of Mathematical Modeling Analysis, and Simulation, Graduate School of Advanced Mathematical Sciences, Meiji University（明治大学高级数学科学学院数学建模分析与模拟系）；Computer Science Department, School of Science and Technology, Meiji University（明治大学理工学部计算机科学系）
Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；University of Strathclyde（思克莱德大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
The cybersecurity of smart grids has become one of key problems in developing reliable modern power and energy systems. This paper introduces a non-stationary adversarial cost with a variation constraint for smart grids and enables us to investigate the problem of optimal smart grid protection against cyber attacks in a relatively practical scenario. In particular, a Bayesian multi-node bandit (MNB) model with adversarial costs is constructed and a new regret function is defined for this model. An algorithm called Thompson-Hedge algorithm is presented to solve the problem and the superior perf…
The presence of embedded electronics and communication capabilities as well as sensing and control in smart devices has given rise to the novel concept of cyber-physical networks, in which agents aim at cooperatively solving complex tasks by local computation and communication. Numerous estimation, learning, decision and control tasks in smart networks involve the solution of large-scale, structured optimization problems in which network agents have only a partial knowledge of the whole problem. Distributed optimization aims at designing local computation and communication rules for the networ…
Smart grids integrate communication systems with power networks to enable power grids operation and command through real-time data collection and control signals. Designing, analyzing, and simulating smart grid infrastructures as well as predicting the impact of power network failures strongly depend on the topologies of the underlying power network and communication system. Despite the substantial impact that the communication systems bring to smart grid operation, the topology of communication systems employed in smart grids was less studied. The power community lacks realistic generative co…
High-wattage demand-side appliances such as Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) are proliferating. As a result, information on the charging patterns of PEVs is becoming accessible via smartphone applications, which aggregate real-time availability and historical usage of public PEV charging stations. Moreover, information on the power grid infrastructure and operations has become increasingly available in technical documents and real-time dashboards of the utilities, affiliates, and the power grid operators. The research question that this study explores is: Can one combine high-wattage demand-si…
Modern electric power grid, known as the Smart Grid, has fast transformed the isolated and centrally controlled power system to a fast and massively connected cyber-physical system that benefits from the revolutions happening in the communications and the fast adoption of Internet of Things devices. While the synergy of a vast number of cyber-physical entities has allowed the Smart Grid to be much more effective and sustainable in meeting the growing global energy challenges, it has also brought with it a large number of vulnerabilities resulting in breaches of data integrity, confidentiality …
As one of the most sophisticated attacks against power grids, coordinated cyber-physical attacks (CCPAs) damage the power grid's physical infrastructure and use a simultaneous cyber attack to mask its effect. This work proposes a novel approach to detect such attacks and identify the location of the line outages (due to the physical attack). The proposed approach consists of three parts. Firstly, moving target defense (MTD) is applied to expose the physical attack by actively perturbing transmission line reactance via distributed flexible AC transmission system (D-FACTS) devices. MTD invalidat…
Electric power grids are at risk of being compromised by high-impact cyber-security threats such as coordinated, timed attacks. Navigating this new threat landscape requires a deep understanding of the potential risks and complex attack processes in energy information systems, which in turn demands an unmanageable manual effort to timely process a large amount of cross-domain information. To provide an adequate basis to contextually assess and understand the situation of smart grids in case of coordinated cyber-attacks, we need a systematic and coherent approach to identify cyber incidents. In…
Smart grid technology has been recognized as a promising solution for the next-generation energy efficient electric power systems to mitigate energy crisis. Smart grid provides highly consistent and reliable services, efficient energy management practices, smart metering integration, automation and precision decision support systems and self-healing facilities. The smart power grid introduces a sensing, monitoring, and control system that provides end users with the cost of energy at any moment through real-time pricing. The classical power system operation has no control over the loads except…
Smart grid plays a crucial role for the smart society and the upcoming carbon neutral society. Achieving autonomous smart grid fault detection is critical for smart grid system state awareness, maintenance and operation. This paper focuses on fault monitoring in smart grid and discusses the inherent technical challenges and solutions. In particular, we first present the basic principles of smart grid fault detection. Then, we explain the new requirements for autonomous smart grid fault detection, the technical challenges and their possible solutions. A case study is introduced, as a preliminar…
Texas A&M University（德克萨斯A&M大学）；Arkansas State University（阿肯色州立大学）
As a highly complex and integrated cyber-physical system, modern power grids are exposed to cyberattacks. False data injection attacks (FDIAs), specifically, represent a major class of cyber threats to smart grids by targeting the measurement data's integrity. Although various solutions have been proposed to detect those cyberattacks, the vast majority of the works have ignored the inherent graph structure of the power grid measurements and validated their detectors only for small test systems with less than a few hundred buses. To better exploit the spatial correlations of smart grid measurem…
On the Exact Solution to a Smart Grid Cyber-Security Analysis Problem
ACCESS Linnaeus Center and the Automatic Control Lab, the School of Electrical Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（林奈中心与自动控制实验室，电气工程学院，皇家理工学院）
Modern smart grids offer several types of digital control and monitoring of electric power transmission and distribution that enable greater efficiency and integrative functionality than traditional power grids. These benefits, however, introduce greater complexity and greatly disrupt and expand the threat landscape. The number of vulnerabilities is increasing as grid-connected devices proliferate. The potential costs to society of these vulnerabilities are difficult to determine, as are their likelihoods of successful exploitation. In this article, we present a method for comparing the net ec…
Increasing volatilities within power transmission and distribution force power grid operators to amplify their use of communication infrastructure to monitor and control their grid. The resulting increase in communication creates a larger attack surface for malicious actors. Indeed, cyber attacks on power grids have already succeeded in causing temporary, large-scale blackouts in the recent past. In this paper, we analyze the communication infrastructure of power grids to derive resulting fundamental challenges of power grids with respect to cybersecurity. Based on these challenges, we identif…
With improvement in smart grids through two-way communication, demand response (DR) has gained significant attention due to the inherent flexibility provided by shifting non-critical loads from peak periods to off-peak periods, which can greatly improve grid reliability and reduce cost of energy. Operators utilize DR to enhance operational flexibility and alleviate network congestion. However, the intelligent two-way communication is susceptible to cyber-attacks. This paper studies the benefits of DR in security-constrained economic dispatch (SCED) and then the vulnerability of the system to l…
We model the risk posed by a malicious cyber-attacker seeking to induce grid insecurity by means of a load redistribution attack, while explicitly acknowledging that such an actor would plausibly base its decision strategy on imperfect information. More specifically, we introduce a novel formulation for the cyber-attacker's decision-making problem and analyze the distribution of decisions taken with randomly inaccurate data on the grid branch admittances or capacities, and the distribution of their respective impact. Our findings indicate that inaccurate admittance values most often lead to su…
Smart grid (SG) is a complex cyber-physical system that utilizes modern cyber and physical equipment to run at an optimal operating point. Cyberattacks are the principal threats confronting the usage and advancement of the state-of-the-art systems. The advancement of SG has added a wide range of technologies, equipment, and tools to make the system more reliable, efficient, and cost-effective. Despite attaining these goals, the threat space for the adversarial attacks has also been expanded because of the extensive implementation of the cyber networks. Due to the promising computational and re…
Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）；Arkansas State University（阿肯色州立大学）
This study employs Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to efficiently model the inherent graph network structure of the smart grid data to address the cyberattack localization problem. First, we numerically analyze the empirical frequency response of the Finite Impulse Response (FIR) and IIR graph filters (GFs) to approximate an ideal spectral response. We show that, for the same filter order, IIR GFs provide a better approximation to the desired spectral response and they also present the same level of approximation to a lower order GF due to their rational type filter…
As systems like smart grid continue to become complex on a daily basis, emerging issues demand complex solutions that can deal with parameters in multiple domains of engineering. The complex solutions further demand a friendly interface for the users to express their requirements. Cyber-Physical systems deals with the study of techniques that are committed to modeling, simulating and solving the problems that emerge from a multi-disciplinary outlook towards futuristic systems. This thesis is mainly concerned with the development of user-friendly cyber-physical frameworks that can tackle variou…
Smart Grid has rapidly transformed the centrally controlled power system into a massively interconnected cyber-physical system that benefits from the revolutions happening in the communications (e.g. 5G) and the growing proliferation of the Internet of Things devices (such as smart metres and intelligent electronic devices). While the convergence of a significant number of cyber-physical elements has enabled the Smart Grid to be far more efficient and competitive in addressing the growing global energy challenges, it has also introduced a large number of vulnerabilities culminating in violatio…
While the digitization of power distribution grids brings many benefits, it also introduces new vulnerabilities for cyber-attacks. To maintain secure operations in the emerging threat landscape, detecting and implementing countermeasures against cyber-attacks are paramount. However, due to the lack of publicly available attack data against Smart Grids (SGs) for countermeasure development, simulation-based data generation approaches offer the potential to provide the needed data foundation. Therefore, our proposed approach provides flexible and scalable replication of multi-staged cyber-attacks…
Social Networks (SNs) have been gradually applied by utility companies as an addition to smart grid and are proved to be helpful in smoothing load curves and reducing energy usage. However, SNs also bring in new threats to smart grid: misinformation in SNs may cause smart grid users to alter their demand, resulting in transmission line overloading and in turn leading to catastrophic impact to the grid. In this paper, we discuss the interdependency in the social network coupled smart grid and focus on its vulnerability. That is, how much can the smart grid be damaged when misinformation related…
This paper presents a Temporal Graph Neural Network (TGNN) framework for detection and localization of false data injection and ramp attacks on the system state in smart grids. Capturing the topological information of the system through the GNN framework along with the state measurements can improve the performance of the detection mechanism. The problem is formulated as a classification problem through a GNN with message passing mechanism to identify abnormal measurements. The residual block used in the aggregation process of message passing and the gated recurrent unit can lead to improved c…
The concept of smart grid has been introduced as a new vision of the conventional power grid to figure out an efficient way of integrating green and renewable energy technologies. In this way, Internet-connected smart grid, also called energy Internet, is also emerging as an innovative approach to ensure the energy from anywhere at any time. The ultimate goal of these developments is to build a sustainable society. However, integrating and coordinating a large number of growing connections can be a challenging issue for the traditional centralized grid system. Consequently, the smart grid is u…
