Biblio

Smart grids integrate computing and communication infrastructure with conventional power grids to improve situational awareness, control, and safety. Several technologies such as automatic fault detection, automated reconfiguration, and outage management require close network monitoring. Therefore, utilities utilize sensing equipment such as PMUs (phasor measurement units), smart meters, and bellwether meters to obtain grid measurements. However, the expansion in sensing equipment results in an increased strain on existing communication infrastructure. Prior works overcome this problem by exploiting the sparsity of power consumption data in the Haar, Hankel, and Toeplitz transformation bases to achieve sub-Nyquist compression. However, data-driven dictionaries enable superior compression ratios and reconstruction accuracy by learning the sparsifying basis. Therefore, this work proposes using dictionary learning to learn the sparsifying basis of smart meter data. The smart meter data sent to the data centers are compressed using a random projection matrix prior to transmission. These measurements are aggregated to obtain the compressed measurements at the primary nodes. Compressive sensing-based estimators are then utilized to estimate the system states. This approach was validated on the IEEE 33-node distribution system and showed superior reconstruction accuracy over conventional transformation bases and over-complete dictionaries. Voltage magnitude and angle estimation error less than 0.3% mean absolute percentage error and 0.04 degree mean absolute error, respectively, were achieved at compression ratios as high as eight.

False data injection cyber-attack detection models on smart grid operation have been much explored recently, considering analytical physics-based and data-driven solutions. Recently, a hybrid data-driven physics-based model framework for monitoring the smart grid is developed. However, the framework has not been implemented in real-time environment yet. In this paper, the framework of the hybrid model is developed within a real-time simulation environment. OPAL-RT real-time simulator is used to enable Hardware-in-the-Loop testing of the framework. IEEE 9-bus system is considered as a testing grid for gaining insight. The process of building the framework and the challenges faced during development are presented. The performance of the framework is investigated under various false data injection attacks.

One major tool of Energy Management Systems for monitoring the status of the power grid is State Estimation (SE). Since the results of state estimation are used within the energy management system, the security of the power system state estimation tool is most important. The research in this area is targeting detection of False Data Injection attacks on measurements. Though this aspect is crucial, SE also depends on database that are used to describe the relationship between measurements and systems' states. This paper presents a two-stage optimization framework to not only detect, but also correct cyber-attacks pertaining the measurements' model parameters used by the SE routine. In the first stage, an estimate of the line parameters ratios are obtained. In the second stage, the estimated ratios from stage I are used in a Bi-Level model for obtaining a final estimate of the measurements' model parameters. Hence, the presented framework does not only unify the detection and correction in a single optimization run, but also provide a monitoring scheme for the SE database that is typically considered static. In addition, in the two stages, linear programming framework is preserved. For validation, the IEEE 118 bus system is used for implementation. The results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for detecting attacks in the database used in the state estimation process.

Power system state estimation is an essential tool for monitoring the operating conditions of the grid. However, the collected measurements may not always be reliable due to bad data from various faults as well as the increasing potential of being exposed to cyber-attacks, particularly from data injection attacks. To enhance the accuracy of state estimation, this paper presents a back-propagation neural network to detect and identify bad data and false data injections. A variety of training data exhibiting different statistical properties were used for training. The developed strategy was tested on the IEEE 30-bus and 118-bus power systems using MATLAB. Simulation results revealed the feasibility of the method for the detection and differentiation of bad data and false data injections in various operating scenarios.

In power networks, it is important to detect a cyber attack. In this paper, we propose a detection method of false data injection (FDI) attacks. FDI attacks cannot be detected from the estimation error in power networks. The proposed method is based on the distributed state estimation, and is used the tentative estimated state. The proposed method is demonstrated by a numerical example on the IEEE 14-bus system.

Power grids are the most extensive man-made systems that are difficult to control and monitor. With the development of conventional power grids and moving toward smart grids, power systems have undergone vast changes since they use the Internet to transmit information and control commands to different parts of the power system. Due to the use of the Internet as a basic infrastructure for smart grids, attackers can sabotage the communication networks and alter the measurements. Due to the complexity of the smart grids, it is difficult for the network operator to detect such cyber-attacks. The attackers can implement the attack in a manner that conventional Bad Data detection (BDD) systems cannot detect since it may not violate the physical laws of the power system. This paper uses the cross wavelet transform (XWT) to detect stealth false data injections attacks (FDIAs) against state estimation (SE) systems. XWT can capture the coherency between measurements of adjacent buses and represent it in time and frequency space. Then, we train a machine learning classification algorithm to distinguish attacked measurements from normal measurements by applying a feature extraction technique.

State estimation algorithm ensures an effective realtime monitoring of the modern smart grid leading to an accurate determination of the current operating states. Recently, a new genre of data integrity attacks namely false data injection attack (FDIA) has shown its deleterious effects by bypassing the traditional bad data detection technique. Modern grid operators must detect the presence of such attacks in the raw field measurements to guarantee a safe and reliable operation of the grid. State forecasting based FDIA identification schemes have recently shown its efficacy by determining the deviation of the estimated states due to an attack. This work emphasizes on a scalable deep learning state forecasting model which can accurately determine the presence of FDIA in real-time. An optimal set of hyper-parameters of the proposed architecture leads to an effective forecasting of the operating states with minimal error. A diligent comparison between other state of the art forecasting strategies have promoted the effectiveness of the proposed neural network. A comprehensive analysis on the IEEE 14 bus test bench effectively promotes the proposed real-time attack identification strategy.

In state estimation of steady-state power networks, a cyber attack that cannot be detected from the residual (i.e., the estimation error) is called a false data injection attack. In this paper, to enforce security of power networks, we propose a method of detecting a false data injection attack. In the proposed method, a false data injection attack is detected by randomly choosing sensors used in state estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is presented by two numerical examples including the IEEE 14-bus system.

State estimation is the core operation performed within the energy management system (EMS) of smart grid. Hence, the reliability and integrity of a smart grid relies heavily on the performance of sensor measurement dependent state estimation process. The increasing penetration of cyber control into the smart grid operations has raised severe concern for executing a secured state estimation process. The limitation with regard to monitoring large number of sensors allows an intruder to manipulate sensor information, as one of the soft targets for disrupting power system operations. Phasor measurement unit (PMU) can be adopted as an alternative to immunize the state estimation from corrupted conventional sensor measurements. However, the high installation cost of PMUs restricts its installation throughout the network. In this paper a graphical approach is proposed to identify minimum PMU placement locations, so as to detect any intrusion of malicious activity within the smart grid. The high speed synchronized PMU information ensures processing of secured set of sensor measurements to the control center. The results of PMU information based linear state estimation is compared with the conventional non-linear state estimation to detect any attack within the system. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme has been validated on IEEE 14 bus test system.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) play an increasingly significant role in many critical applications. These valuable applications attract various sophisticated attacks. This paper considers a stealthy estimation attack, which aims to modify the state estimation of the CPSs. The intelligent attackers can learn defense strategies and use clandestine attack strategies to avoid detection. To address the issue, we design a Chi-square detector in a Digital Twin (DT), which is an online digital model of the physical system. We use a Signaling Game with Evidence (SGE) to find the optimal attack and defense strategies. Our analytical results show that the proposed defense strategies can mitigate the impact of the attack on the physical estimation and guarantee the stability of the CPSs. Finally, we use an illustrative application to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework.

The application of network technology and high-tech equipment in power systems has increased the degree of grid intelligence, and malicious attacks on smart grids have also increased year by year. The wrong data injection attack launched by the attacker will destroy the integrity of the data by changing the data of the sensor and controller, which will lead to the wrong decision of the control system and even paralyze the power transmission network. This paper uses the measured values of smart grid sensors as samples, analyzes the attack vectors maliciously injected by attackers and the statistical characteristics of system data, and proposes a false data injection attack detection strategy. It is considered that the measured values of sensors have spatial distribution characteristics, the Gaussian mixture model of grid node feature vectors is obtained by training sample values, the test measurement values are input into the Gaussian mixture model, and the knowledge of clustering is used to detect whether the power grid is malicious data attacks. The power supplies of IEEE-18 and IEEE-30 simulation systems was tested, and the influence of the system statistical measurement characteristics on the detection accuracy was analyzed. The results show that the proposed strategy has better detection performance than the support vector machine method.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) maintain operation, reliability, and safety performance using state estimation and control methods. Internet connectivity and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are integrated with CPS, such as in smart grids. This integration of Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) brings with it challenges for state estimation and exposure to cyber-threats. This research establishes a state estimation baseline, details the integration of IT, evaluates the vulnerabilities, and develops an approach for detecting and responding to cyber-attack data injections. Where other approaches focus on integration of IT cyber-controls, this research focuses on development of classification tools using data currently available in state estimation methods to quantitatively determine the presence of cyber-attack data. The tools may increase computational requirements but provide methods which can be integrated with existing state estimation methods and provide for future research in state estimation based cyber-attack incident response. A robust cyber-resilient CPS includes the ability to detect and classify a cyber-attack, determine the true system state, and respond to the cyber-attack. The purpose of this paper is to establish a means for a cyber aware state estimator given the existence of sub-erroneous outlier detection, cyber-attack data weighting, cyber-attack data classification, and state estimation cyber detection.

With the advancement of communication technology, the interoperability of the power grid operation has improved significantly, but due to its dependence on the communication system, it is extremely vulnerable to network attacks. Among them, the false data injection attack utilizes the loophole of bad data detection in the system and attacks the state estimation system, resulting in frequent occurrence of abnormal data in the system, which brings great harm to the power grid. In view of the fact that false data injection attacks are easy to avoid traditional bad data detection methods, this paper analyzes the different situations of false data injection attacks based on the characteristics of the power grid. Firstly, it proposes to apply the distortion index method to false data injection attack detection. Experiments prove that the detection results are good and can be complementary to traditional detection methods. Then, combined with the traditional normalized residual method, this paper proposes the improved distortion index method based on the distortion index, which is good at detecting abnormal data. The use of improved distortion index method to detect false data injection attacks can make up for the defect of the lack of universality of traditional detection methods, and meet the requirements of anomaly detection efficiency. Finally, based on the MATLAB power simulation test system, experimental simulation is carried out to verify the effectiveness and universality of the proposed method for false data injection attack detection.

As power grid control systems become increasingly automated and distributed, security has become a significant design concern. Systems increasingly expose new avenues, at a variety of levels, for attackers to exploit and enable widespread disruptions and/or surveillance. Much prior work has explored the implications of attack models focused on false data injection at the front-end of the control system (i.e. during state estimation) [1]. Instead, in this paper we focus on characterizing the inherent cyber-attack vulnerabilities with power flow. Power flow (and power flow constraints) are at the core of many applications critical to operation of power grids (e.g. state estimation, economic dispatch, contingency analysis, etc.). We propose two algorithmic approaches for characterizing the vulnerability of buses within power grids to cyber-attacks. Specifically, we focus on measuring the instability of power flow to attacks which manifest as either voltage or power related errors. Our results show that attacks manifesting as voltage errors are an order of magnitude more likely to cause instability than attacks manifesting as power related errors (and 5x more likely for state estimation as compared to power flow).

Security and consistency of smart grids is one of the main issues in the design and maintenance of highly controlled and monitored new power grids. Bad data injection attack could lead to disasters such as power system outage, or huge economical losses. In many attack scenarios, the attacker can come up with new attack strategies that couldn't be detected by the traditional bad data detection methods. Adaptive Partitioning State Estimation (APSE) method [3] has been proposed recently to combat such attacks. In this work, we evaluate and compare with a traditional method. The main idea of APSE is to increase the sensitivity of the chi-square test by partitioning the large grids into small ones and apply the test on each partition individually and repeat this procedure until the faulty node is located. Our simulation findings using MATPOWER program show that the method is not consistent where it is sensitive the systems size and the location of faulty nodes as well.

On-Load Tap Changing transformers are a widely used voltage regulation device. In the context of modern or smart grids, the control signals, i.e., the tap change commands are sent through SCADA channels. It is well known that the power system SCADA networks are prone to attacks involving injection of false data or commands. While false data injection is well explored in existing literature, attacks involving malicious control signals/commands are relatively unexplored. In this paper, an algorithm is developed to detect a stealthily introduced malicious tap change command through a compromised SCADA channel. This algorithm is based on the observation that a stealthily introduced false data or command masks the true estimation of only a few state variables. This leaves the rest of the state variables to show signs of a change in system state brought about by the attack. Using this observation, an index is formulated based on the ratios of injection or branch currents to voltages of the terminal nodes of the tap changers. This index shows a significant increase when there is a false tap command injection, resulting in easy classification from normal scenarios where there is no attack. The algorithm is computationally light, easy to implement and reliable when tested extensively on several tap changers placed in an IEEE 118-bus system.

Modern cyber-physical systems are increasingly complex and vulnerable to attacks like false data injection aimed at destabilizing and confusing the systems. We develop and evaluate an attack-detection framework aimed at learning a dynamic invariant network, data-driven temporal causal relationships between components of cyber-physical systems. We evaluate the relative performance in attack detection of the proposed model relative to traditional anomaly detection approaches. In this paper, we introduce Granger Causality based Kalman Filter with Adaptive Robust Thresholding (G-KART) as a framework for anomaly detection based on data-driven functional relationships between components in cyber-physical systems. In particular, we select power systems as a critical infrastructure with complex cyber-physical systems whose protection is an essential facet of national security. The system presented is capable of learning with or without network topology the task of detection of false data injection attacks in power systems. Kalman filters are used to learn and update the dynamic state of each component in the power system and in-turn monitor the component for malicious activity. The ego network for each node in the invariant graph is treated as an ensemble model of Kalman filters, each of which captures a subset of the node's interactions with other parts of the network. We finally also introduce an alerting mechanism to surface alerts about compromised nodes.

Real-time supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems use remote terminal units (RTUs) to monitor and manage the flow of power at electrical substations. As their connectivity to different utility and private networks increases, RTUs are becoming more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Some attacks seek to access RTUs to directly control power system devices with the intent to shed load or cause equipment damage. Other attacks (such as denial-of-service) target network availability and seek to block, delay, or corrupt communications between the RTU and the control center. In the most severe case, when communications are entirely blocked, the loss of an RTU can cause the power system to become unobservable. It is important to understand how losing an RTU impacts the system state (bus voltage magnitudes and angles). The system state is determined by the state estimator and serves as the input to other critical EMS applications. There is currently no systematic approach for assessing the cyber-physical impact of losing RTUs. This paper proposes a methodology for N-1 RTU cyber-physical security assessment that could benefit power system control and operation. We demonstrate our approach on the IEEE 14-bus system as well as on a synthetic 200-bus system.

We consider distributed Kalman filter for dynamic state estimation over wireless sensor networks. It is promising but challenging when network is under cyber attacks. Since the information exchange between nodes, the malicious attacks quickly spread across the entire network, which causing large measurement errors and even to the collapse of sensor networks. Aiming at the malicious network attack, a trust-based distributed processing frame is proposed. Which allows neighbor nodes to exchange information, and a series of trusted nodes are found using truth discovery. As a demonstration, distributed Cooperative Localization is considered, and numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach by considering random, false data injection and replay attacks.

This paper considers consensus-based distributed Kalman filtering subject to data-falsification attack, where Byzantine agents share manipulated data with their neighboring agents. The attack is assumed to be coordinated among the Byzantine agents and follows a linear model. The goal of the Byzantine agents is to maximize the network-wide estimation error while evading false-data detectors at honest agents. To that end, we propose a joint selection of Byzantine agents and covariance matrices of attack sequences to maximize the network-wide estimation error subject to constraints on stealthiness and the number of Byzantine agents. The attack strategy is then obtained by employing block-coordinate descent method via Boolean relaxation and backward stepwise based subset selection method. Numerical results show the efficiency of the proposed attack strategy in comparison with other naive and uncoordinated attacks.

The chances of cyber-attacks have been increased because of incorporation of communication networks and information technology in power system. Main objective of the paper is to prove that attacker can launch the attack vector without the knowledge of complete network information and the injected false data can't be detected by power system operator. This paper also deals with analyzing the impact of multi-attacking strategy on the power system. This false data attacks incurs lot of damage to power system, as it misguides the power system operator. Here, we demonstrate the construction of attack vector and later we have demonstrated multiple attacking regions in IEEE 14 bus system. Impact of attack vector on the power system can be observed and it is proved that the attack cannot be detected by power system operator with the help of residue check method.

This paper proposes a multi-target tracking and identity management method with multiple sensors: a primary sensor with a large detection range to provide the targets' state estimates, and multiple secondary sensors capable of recognizing the targets' identities. Each of the secondary sensors is assigned to a sector of the operation area; a secondary sensor decides which target in its assigned sector to be identified and controls itself to identify the target. We formulate the decision-making process as an optimization problem to minimize the uncertainty of the targets' identities subject to the sensor dynamic constraints. The proposed algorithm is decentralized since the secondary sensors only communicate with the primary sensor for the target information, and need not to synchronize with each other. By integrating the proposed algorithm with the existing multi-target tracking algorithms, we develop a closed-loop multi-target tracking and identity management algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated with illustrative numerical examples.

Smart grids are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, which can cause significant damage and huge economic losses. Generally, state estimation (SE) is used to observe the operation of the grid. State estimation of the grid is vulnerable to false data injection attack (FDIA), so diagnosing this type of malicious attack has a major impact on ensuring reliable operation of the power system. In this paper, we present an effective FDIA detection method based on residual recurrent neural network (R2N2) prediction model and adaptive judgment threshold. Specifically, considering the data contains both linear and nonlinear components, the R2N2 model divides the prediction process into two parts: the first part uses the linear model to fit the state data; the second part predicts the nonlinearity of the residuals of the linear prediction model. The adaptive judgment threshold is inferred through fitting the Weibull distribution with the sum of squared errors between the predicted values and observed values. The thorough simulation results demonstrate that our scheme performs better than other prediction based FDIA detection schemes.

Power systems become a primary target of cyber attacks because of the vulnerability of the integrated communication networks. An attacker is able to manipulate the integrity of real-time data by maliciously modifying the readings of meters transmitted to the control center. Moreover, it is demonstrated that such attack can escape the bad data detection in state estimation if the topology and network information of the entire power grid is known to the attacker. In this paper, we propose an isolation forest (IF) based detection algorithm as a countermeasure against false data attack (FDA). This method requires no tedious pre-training procedure to obtain the labels of outliers. In addition, comparing with other algorithms, the IF based detection method can find the outliers quickly. The performance of the proposed detection method is verified using the simulation results on the IEEE 118-bus system.

Autonomic resource management for distributed edge computing systems provides an effective means of enabling dynamic placement and adaptation in the face of network changes, load dynamics, and failures. However, adaptation in-and-of-itself offers a side channel by which malicious entities can extract valuable information. An attacker can take advantage of autonomic resource management techniques to fool a system into misallocating resources and crippling applications. Using a few scenarios, we outline how attacks can be launched using partial knowledge of the resource management substrate - with as little as a single compromised node. We argue that any system that provides adaptation must consider resource management as an attack surface. As such, we propose ADAPT2, a framework that incorporates concepts taken from Moving-Target Defense and state estimation techniques to ensure correctness and obfuscate resource management, thereby protecting valuable system and application information from leaking.