Visible to the public Combined data integrity and availability attacks on state estimation in cyber-physical power grids

TitleCombined data integrity and availability attacks on state estimation in cyber-physical power grids
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsPan, K., Teixeira, A. M. H., Cvetkovic, M., Palensky, P.
Conference Name2016 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm)
Date Publishednov
Keywordscomposability, cyber-physical power grids, Cyber-physical systems, data availability, data availability attacks, data integrity, data integrity attacks, integer programming, integrity-focused mitigation schemes, Linear programming, Metrics, MILP problems, mixed integer linear programming, multipath routing, multipath routing communication models, power engineering computing, power grid vulnerability, power grid vulnerability analysis, power grids, power system model, power system state estimation, pubcrawl, Resiliency, security, security metrics, security of data, single path routing, Smart grids, Substations, Transmission line measurements
Abstract

This paper introduces combined data integrity and availability attacks to expand the attack scenarios against power system state estimation. The goal of the adversary, who uses the combined attack, is to perturb the state estimates while remaining hidden from the observer. We propose security metrics that quantify vulnerability of power grids to combined data attacks under single and multi-path routing communication models. In order to evaluate the proposed security metrics, we formulate them as mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problems. The relation between the security metrics of combined data attacks and pure data integrity attacks is analyzed, based on which we show that, when data availability and data integrity attacks have the same cost, the two metrics coincide. When data availability attacks have a lower cost than data integrity attacks, we show that a combined data attack could be executed with less attack resources compared to pure data integrity attacks. Furthermore, it is shown that combined data attacks would bypass integrity-focused mitigation schemes. These conclusions are supported by the results obtained on a power system model with and without a communication model with single or multi-path routing.

URLhttps://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7778773/
DOI10.1109/SmartGridComm.2016.7778773
Citation Keypan_combined_2016