Local Cyber-physical Attack with Leveraging Detection in Smart Grid

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel combinational attack strategy on smart grids that effectively masks line outages and misleads control centers, increasing the risk of cascade failures without requiring prolonged attack periods.

Contribution

It proposes a new attack method that masks line outages at one location while misleading detection systems about another, enhancing attack effectiveness and stealth.

Findings

The attack can continuously deceive control centers.

Simulation confirms the attack's effectiveness.

Vulnerable lines can be systematically identified.

Abstract

A well-designed attack in the power system can cause an initial failure and then results in large-scale cascade failure. Several works have discussed power system attack through false data injection, line-maintaining attack, and line-removing attack. However, the existing methods need to continuously attack the system for a long time, and, unfortunately, the performance cannot be guaranteed if the system states vary. To overcome this issue, we consider a new type of attack strategy called combinational attack which masks a line-outage at one position but misleads the control center on line outage at another position. Therefore, the topology information in the control center is interfered by our attack. We also offer a procedure of selecting the vulnerable lines of its kind. The proposed method can effectively and continuously deceive the control center in identifying the actual position of line-outage. The system under attack will be exposed to increasing risks as the attack continuously. Simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed attack strategy.