Importance-driven denial of service attack strategy design against remote state estimation in multi-agent intelligent power systems

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel importance-driven denial of service (IDoS) attack strategy aimed at impairing the quality of remote estimators for target agents within multi-agent intelligent power systems. The strategy features two key aspects. Firstly, the IDoS attack strategy concentrates on target agents, enabling attackers to determine the voltage sensitivity of each agent based on limited information. By utilizing these sensitivities, the proposed strategy selectively targets agents with high sensitivity to amplify disruption on the target agent. Secondly, unlike most existing denial of service attack strategies that adhere to predefined attack sequences, IDoS attacks can selectively target important packets on highly sensitive agents, causing further disruption to the target agent. Simulation results on the IEEE 39-Bus system demonstrate that, compared to existing denial of service attack strategies, the proposed IDoS attack strategy significantly diminishes the estimation quality of the target agent, confirming its effectiveness from an attacker's perspective.