TY - JOUR
T1 - N-1 Reliability Makes It Difficult for False Data Injection Attacks to Cause Physical Consequences
AU - Chu, Zhigang
AU - Zhang, Jiazi
AU - Kosut, Oliver
AU - Sankar, Lalitha
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received January 31, 2020; revised June 12, 2020, September 22, 2020, and December 17, 2020; accepted February 13, 2021. Date of publication February 23, 2021; date of current version August 19, 2021. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants number CNS-1449080 and OAC-1934766. Paper no. TPWRS-00170-2020. (Corresponding author: Zhigang Chu.) The authors are with the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, US (e-mail: zchu2@asu.edu; jzhan188@asu.edu; okosut@asu.edu; lalithasankar@asu.edu).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1969-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2021/9
Y1 - 2021/9
N2 - This paper demonstrates that false data injection (FDI) attacks are extremely limited in their ability to cause physical consequences on N-1 reliable power systems operating with real-time contingency analysis (RTCA) and security constrained economic dispatch (SCED). Prior work has shown that FDI attacks can be designed via an attacker-defender bi-level linear program (ADBLP) to cause physical overflows after re-dispatch using DCOPF. In this paper, it is shown that attacks designed using DCOPF fail to cause overflows on N-1 reliable systems because the system response modeled is inaccurate. An ADBLP that accurately models the system response is proposed to find the worst-case physical consequences, thereby modeling a strong attacker with system level knowledge. Simulation results on the synthetic Texas system with 2000 buses show that even with the new enhanced attacks, for systems operated conservatively due to N-1 constraints, the designed attacks only lead to post-contingency overflows. Moreover, the attacker must control a large portion of measurements and physically create a contingency in the system to cause consequences. Therefore, it is conceivable but requires an extremely sophisticated attacker to cause physical consequences on N-1 reliable power systems operated with RTCA and SCED.
AB - This paper demonstrates that false data injection (FDI) attacks are extremely limited in their ability to cause physical consequences on N-1 reliable power systems operating with real-time contingency analysis (RTCA) and security constrained economic dispatch (SCED). Prior work has shown that FDI attacks can be designed via an attacker-defender bi-level linear program (ADBLP) to cause physical overflows after re-dispatch using DCOPF. In this paper, it is shown that attacks designed using DCOPF fail to cause overflows on N-1 reliable systems because the system response modeled is inaccurate. An ADBLP that accurately models the system response is proposed to find the worst-case physical consequences, thereby modeling a strong attacker with system level knowledge. Simulation results on the synthetic Texas system with 2000 buses show that even with the new enhanced attacks, for systems operated conservatively due to N-1 constraints, the designed attacks only lead to post-contingency overflows. Moreover, the attacker must control a large portion of measurements and physically create a contingency in the system to cause consequences. Therefore, it is conceivable but requires an extremely sophisticated attacker to cause physical consequences on N-1 reliable power systems operated with RTCA and SCED.
KW - Bi-level optimization
KW - cyber-security
KW - false data injection attack
KW - vulnerability of N-1 reliable power systems
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U2 - 10.1109/TPWRS.2021.3061480
DO - 10.1109/TPWRS.2021.3061480
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85101757392
SN - 0885-8950
VL - 36
SP - 3897
EP - 3906
JO - IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
JF - IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
IS - 5
M1 - 9361312
ER -