Biblio

While cyberattacks pose a relatively new challenge for power grid control systems, commercial cloud systems have needed to address similar threats for many years. However, technology and approaches developed for cloud systems do not necessarily transfer directly to the power grid, due to important differences between the two domains. We discuss our experience adapting intrusion-tolerant cloud technologies to the power domain and describe the challenges we have encountered and potential directions for overcoming those obstacles.

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).