Data Poisoning: An Overlooked Threat to Power Grid Resilience

TL;DR

This paper reviews adversarial disruptions in power grids, emphasizing that data poisoning threats are often overlooked but can significantly threaten grid resilience, especially as data-driven methods become more prevalent.

Contribution

It highlights the gap in research between poisoning and evasion attacks on power systems and demonstrates how data poisoning can endanger grid resilience.

Findings

Data poisoning threats are underexplored in power grid security.

Adversarial training often focuses on evasion, neglecting poisoning.

Poisoning attacks can significantly compromise power grid operations.

Abstract

As the complexities of Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems increase, preserving their resilience becomes more challenging. For instance, maintaining power grid resilience is becoming increasingly complicated due to the growing number of stochastic variables (such as renewable outputs) and extreme weather events that add uncertainty to the grid. Current optimization methods have struggled to accommodate this rise in complexity. This has fueled the growing interest in data-driven methods used to operate the grid, leading to more vulnerability to cyberattacks. One such disruption that is commonly discussed is the adversarial disruption, where the intruder attempts to add a small perturbation to input data in order to "manipulate" the system operation. During the last few years, work on adversarial training and disruptions on the power system has gained popularity. In this paper, we will first review these applications, specifically on the most common types of adversarial disruptions: evasion and poisoning disruptions. Through this review, we highlight the gap between poisoning and evasion research when applied to the power grid. This is due to the underlying assumption that model training is secure, leading to evasion disruptions being the primary type of studied disruption. Finally, we will examine the impacts of data poisoning interventions and showcase how they can endanger power grid resilience.