Abstract
Modern cyber-physical power systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks. Given that cyber and physical networks are coupled tightly, attacks in the cyber layer can penetrate the physical layer, causing the outage of transmission lines and other physical equipment, thus changing the topology of the grid. In some extreme scenarios, the topological change will disrupt the emergency response of the grid, eventually causing cascading outages along with a blackout. Therefore, as the defender, the operator of a cyber-physical power system should identify critical cyber attacks. In this paper, patterns of sequential cyber topological attacks are analyzed. Firstly, a coordinated attack process is established, including mechanism and probability analysis considering the different timescales. Secondly, the concept of patterns is defined as minimal attack sequences aimed at causing blackouts. Furthermore, the representativeness of patterns is illustrated, which can significantly reduce the storage of risky attack sequences. Thirdly, to address the problem that the identification of patterns is computationally intensive, a search strategy that selects the next attack target dynamically and increases the search depth gradually is proposed to avoid unnecessary search trials. Lastly, tests are carried out on the IEEE 39-node system using the AC power flow model, which validates the representativeness of patterns and the performance of the proposed search strategy.
Highlights
Modern power systems are more coupled with cyber infrastructures than ever before [1]
While authors in [14] mentioned the possibility of cascading outages caused by the topological attack, they did not analyze the process in depth
The cyber systems are interconnected by the same topology of the physical network
Summary
Modern power systems are more coupled with cyber infrastructures than ever before [1]. [12] predicted risky areas in a heterogeneous CPPS under topological attacks In both [13] and [14], the authors proposed a cyber-physical coordinated attack scheme, which trips a transmission line physically while falsifying measurements in the cyber layer, to mislead operators and cause load shedding. While authors in [14] mentioned the possibility of cascading outages caused by the topological attack, they did not analyze the process in depth. We still need to explore the mechanism of cyber topological attacks and the process of the following cascading outages. The contributions of this paper are threefold: 1) A process of coordinated cyber topological attacks in the CPPS, which can cause cascading outages, is established.
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