In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and physical consequences of cyber attacks against energy management systems (EMS). Within this framework, we have designed a complete simulation platform to emulate realistic EMS operations: it includes state estimation (SE), real-time contingency analysis (RTCA), and security constrained economic dispatch (SCED). This software platform allowed us to achieve two main objectives: 1) to study the cyber vulnerabilities of an EMS and understand their consequences on the system, and 2) to formulate and implement countermeasures against cyber-attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities. Our results show that the false data injection attacks against state estimation described in the literature do not easily cause base-case overflows because of the conservatism introduced by RTCA. For a successful attack, a more sophisticated model that includes all of the EMS blocks is needed; even in this scenario, only post-contingency violations can be achieved. Nonetheless, we propose several countermeasures that can detect changes due to cyber-attacks and limit their impact on the system.
@article{arxiv.2104.13908,
title = {A Verifiable Framework for Cyber-Physical Attacks and Countermeasures in a Resilient Electric Power Grid},
author = {Zhigang Chu and Andrea Pinceti and Ramin Kaviani and Roozbeh Khodadadeh and Xingpeng Li and Jiazi Zhang and Karthik Saikumar and Mostafa Sahraei-Ardakani and Christopher Mosier and Robin Podmore and Kory Hedman and Oliver Kosut and Lalitha Sankar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.13908},
year = {2021}
}