Biblio

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.

This paper is concerned about the security vulnerabilities in the implementation of the Congestion Revenue Rights (CRR) markets. Such problems may be due to the weakly detectable network model parameter errors which are commonly found in power systems. CRRs are financial tools for hedging the risk of congestion charges in power markets. The reimbursements received by CRR holders are determined by the congestion patterns and Locational Marginal Prices (LMPs) in the day-ahead markets, which heavily rely on the parameters in the network model. It is recently shown that detection of errors in certain network model parameters may be very difficult. This paper's primary goal is to illustrate the lack of market security due to such vulnerabilities, i.e. CRR market calculations can be manipulated by injecting parameter errors which are not likely to be detected. A case study using the IEEE 14-bus system will illustrate the feasibility of such undetectable manipulations. Several suggestions for preventing such cyber security issues are provided at the end of the paper.