Vulnerability of Distributed Inverter VAR Control in PV Distributed Energy System

TL;DR

This paper investigates the vulnerability of distributed inverter VAR control schemes in PV energy systems, revealing that simple false data injection attacks can compromise the control without detection.

Contribution

It formulates a distributed inverter VAR control problem, introduces a heuristic attack model, and demonstrates the scheme's vulnerability through a case study.

Findings

Distributed control can be compromised by false data injection.

Simple attacks can violate control constraints undetected.

Vulnerabilities exist due to two-hop communication patterns.

Abstract

This work studies the potential vulnerability of distributed control schemes in smart grids. To this end, we consider an optimal inverter VAR control problem within a PV-integrated distribution network. First, we formulate the centralized optimization problem considering the reactive power priority and further reformulate the problem into a distributed framework by an accelerated proximal projection method. The inverter controller can curtail the PV output of each user by clamping the reactive power. To illustrate the studied distributed control scheme that may be vulnerable due to the two-hop information communication pattern, we present a heuristic attack injecting false data during the information exchange. Then we analyze the attack impact on the update procedure of critical parameters. A case study with an eight-node test feeder demonstrates that adversaries can violate the constraints of distributed control scheme without being detected through simple attacks such as the proposed attack.