Sensitivity-Based Vulnerability Assessment of State Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic method to identify vulnerable measurements in power system state estimation that are influential, hard to detect when corrupted, and consistent across operating conditions.

Contribution

It presents a novel sensitivity-based approach to assess measurement vulnerability for false data injection attacks in power systems.

Findings

Method successfully identifies critical measurements in test systems.

Vulnerable measurements are consistent across different operating conditions.

Approach enhances understanding of attack targets in power system security.

Abstract

We propose a technique to assess the vulnerability of the power system state estimator. We aim at identifying measurements that have a high potential of being the target of false data injection attacks. From an adversary's point of view, such measurements have to show the following characteristics: i) being influential on the variable estimates, and ii) corrupting their measured values is likely to be undetected. Additionally, such characteristics should not change significantly with the system's operating condition. Our technique provides a systematic way of identifying measurements with such characteristics. We illustrate our methodology on a 4-bus system and the New England 39-bus system.