Load Oscillating Attacks of Smart Grids: Demand Strategies and Vulnerability Analysis

We investigate the vulnerability of a power transmission grid to load oscillation attacks. We demonstrate that an adversary with a relatively small amount of resources can launch a successful load oscillation attack to destabilize the grid. The adversary is assumed to be able to compromise smart meters at a subset of load buses and control their switches. In the studied attack scenarios the adversary estimates the line flow sensitivity factors (LFSFs) associated with the monitored tie lines by perturbing a small amount of load at compromised buses and observing the monitored lines flow changes. The learned LFSF values are used for selecting a target line and optimizing the oscillation attack to cause the target line to trip while minimizing the magnitude of load oscillation. We evaluated the attack impact using the COSMIC time-domain simulator with two test cases, the IEEE RTS 96 and Polish 2383-Bus Systems. The proposed attack strategy succeeded in causing 33% of load to be shed while oscillating only 7% of load in the IEEE RTS 96 test system, and full blackout after oscillating only 3% of the load in the Polish test system, which is much smaller than oscillation magnitudes used by other benchmarks.