Network Parameter Coordinated False Data Injection Attacks Against Power System AC State Estimation
Chensheng Liu, Hao Liang, Tongwen Chen
Abstract
False data injection (FDI) attacks have recently been introduced as an important class of cyber-attacks against power system state estimation. Utilizing vulnerabilities in information systems, attackers can inject well-constructed false data and stealthily misguide results of state estimation. However, only measurements, such as power flows and bus injections, are coordinately modified in FDI attacks, which may result in a larger number of modified measurements in constructing such attacks. In this article, we propose a network parameter coordinated false data injection (NP-FDI) attack to reduce the number of attacked measurements, where expected changes of system states and modifications of network parameters are well coordinated. Analysis of minimal attack set at a single line gives feasible conditions in reducing the number of attacked measurements. A sparse attack strategy is designed to obtain the minimal attack set of the whole grid, which can also be applied to cases with incomplete topology information. An extension to NP-FDI attacks with incomplete line impedance is presented, where the required line impedance can be estimated from local measurements adjacent to the targeted branch. Based on simulations in the IEEE 14-bus and IEEE 118-bus test systems, performance of the proposed NP-FDI attacks on sparsity and stealth are evaluated.