A Hybrid Cyber Attack Model for Cyber-Physical Power Systems

• Published in: IEEE access 2020, Vol.8, p.114876-114883
• Main Authors: Tu, Haicheng, Xia, Yongxiang, Tse, Chi K., Chen, Xi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: attack cost; Availability; cyber security; Cyber-physical power system; Cyberattack; Cybersecurity; differential evolution algorithm; False alarms; Integrity; Mathematical model; Meters; Power systems; SCADA systems; State estimation; Transmission line measurements
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3003323

Over the past decade, the cyber security of power systems has been widely studied. Most previous studies have focused on cyber physical attacks, and barely considered one typical cyber attack: availability attack. We propose a hybrid attack model and apply conventional state estimation processes to study cyber attacks on power grids in this paper. The proposed model considers both integrity attack and availability attack simultaneously. Compared with the particular attack, namely, false data injected attack, we analyze their consequences to power systems in the events of false negatives attack and false alarm attack. The results show that the hybrid attack can confuse the control center by manipulating the integrity and availability of measurements. More importantly, we evaluate the hybrid attack with different values of the cost ratio between integrity and availability attacks, and then verify that the hybrid attack can achieve the same goal with a reduced cost.