Zero-Parameter-Information Data Integrity Attacks and Countermeasures in IoT-Based Smart Grid

Abstract

Data integrity attack (DIA) is one class of threatening cyber attacks against the Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based smart grid. With the assumption that the attacker is capable of obtaining complete or incomplete information of the system topology and branch parameters, it has been widely recognized that the highly synthesized DIA can evade being detected and undermine the smart grid state estimation. However, the branch parameters cannot be easily obtained or inferred by the attacker in practice. They can be changed or disturbed with time. In this article, we complete the class of DIA by designing the zero-parameter-information DIA (ZDIA), which makes it possible for the attacker to execute stealthy data tampering attacks without any information of the branch parameters. Only the topology information about the cut line is required to construct such attack. We prove that, the attacker can arbitrarily modify the state estimate of a one-degree bus, which is connected to the outside only by a single cut line; and modify the state estimates of all buses, with the same arbitrary bias, in a one-degree super-bus, which is a group of buses that is connected to the outside only by a single cut line. Besides, we extend ZDIA to the cases where a bus and super-bus are connected to the outside only by several cut lines. Moreover, we propose two countermeasures to address the topology vulnerability exploited by ZDIA, and present a branch perturbation strategy to defend against general DIAs. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations with the IEEE standard power systems to validate the theoretical results.