Implication of Unobservable State-and-topology Cyber-physical Attacks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how unobservable cyber-physical attacks that alter network state and topology data can cause physical damage and overloads in power systems, revealing increased vulnerability to outages.

Contribution

It formulates a two-stage optimization model to analyze the impact of unobservable cyber-physical attacks on power system stability and vulnerability.

Findings

Unobservable attacks can cause line overloads and outages.

Such attacks increase system vulnerability to failures.

The study highlights the need for improved detection methods.

Abstract

This paper studies the physical consequences of a class of unobservable state-and-topology cyber-physical attacks in which both state and topology data for a sub-network of the network are changed by an attacker to mask a physical attack. The problem is formulated as a two-stage optimization problem which aims to cause overload in a line of the network with limited attack resources. It is shown that unobservable state-and-topology cyber-physical attacks as studied in this paper can make the system operation more vulnerable to line outages and failures.