A Double-Benefit Moving Target Defense Against Cyber–Physical Attacks in Smart Grid

Abstract

The smart grid (SG), as one of the largest evolutionary critical infrastructures, witnesses the deep integration of electricity facilities and Internet of Things (IoT). But recent events show that the vulnerabilities exposed in IoT devices can be exploited by adversaries to construct the cyberattacks on SG. To address this threat, plenty of countermeasures have been proposed to enhance the SG’s security. However, the additional costs introduced by some countermeasures make the utilities hesitate to implement them practically. To alleviate this concern, in this article, we propose a double-benefit moving target defense (dB-MTD) to protect the SG from cyber–physical attacks (CPAs) and also gain generation-cost benefits. The dB-MTD enables the prevention of stealthy CPAs on the transmission lines by perturbing the reactances with the distributed flexible AC transmission system (D-FACTS). To reduce the infrastructure cost, we minimize the number of required D-FACTS devices for a specific protection goal. Although it needs investment on D-FACTS, we find that the utility can make profits from the generation costs by appropriately setting the reactance perturbations. Therefore, we formulate an optimization problem to compute the optimal reactance perturbations to maximize the generation-cost benefits, without sacrificing the protection performance of dB-MTD. Finally, using the real-world load profiles, we conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the impact of CPA on the system operation and the benefits obtained by the dB-MTD from the aspects of the D-FACTS deployment and the generation-cost profits.