Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Oliver Kosut, Jia Liyan, Robert J. Thomas, Lang Tong. "Malicious Data Attacks on the Smart Grid". IEEE Trans. Smart Grid Special Issue on Cyber, Physical, and System Security for Smart Grid, 2(4):645-658, 2012.

Abstract
Malicious attacks against power systems are investigated, in which an adversary controls a set of meters and is able to alter the measurements from those meters. Two regimes of attacks are considered. The strong attack regime is where the adversary attacks a sufficient number of meters so that the network state becomes unobservable by the control center. For attacks in this regime, the smallest set of attacked meters capable of causing network unobservability is characterized using a graph theoretic approach. By casting the problem as one of minimizing a supermodular graph functional, the problem of identifying the smallest set of vulnerable meters is shown to have polynomial complexity. For the weak attack regime where the adversary controls only a small number of meters, the problem is examined from a decision theoretic perspective for both the control center and the adversary. For the control center, a generalized likelihood ratio detector is proposed that incorporates historical data. For the adversary, the trade-off between maximizing estimation error at the control center and minimizing detection probability of the launched attack is examined. An optimal attack based on minimum energy leakage is proposed.

Electronic downloads

• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6032057

• HTML

  Oliver Kosut, Jia Liyan, Robert J. Thomas, Lang Tong. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/879.html"
  >Malicious Data Attacks on the Smart Grid</a>,
  <i>IEEE Trans. Smart Grid Special Issue on Cyber,
  Physical, and System Security for Smart Grid</i>,
  2(4):645-658,  2012.

• Plain text

  Oliver Kosut, Jia Liyan, Robert J. Thomas, Lang Tong.
  "Malicious Data Attacks on the Smart Grid".
  <i>IEEE Trans. Smart Grid Special Issue on Cyber,
  Physical, and System Security for Smart Grid</i>,
  2(4):645-658,  2012.

• BibTeX

  @article{KosutLiyanThomasTong12_MaliciousDataAttacksOnSmartGrid,
      author = {Oliver Kosut and Jia Liyan and Robert J. Thomas
                and Lang Tong},
      title = {Malicious Data Attacks on the Smart Grid},
      journal = {IEEE Trans. Smart Grid Special Issue on Cyber,
                Physical, and System Security for Smart Grid},
      volume = {2},
      number = {4},
      pages = {pp. 645-658},
      year = {2012},
      abstract = {Malicious attacks against power systems are
                investigated, in which an adversary controls a set
                of meters and is able to alter the measurements
                from those meters. Two regimes of attacks are
                considered. The strong attack regime is where the
                adversary attacks a sufficient number of meters so
                that the network state becomes unobservable by the
                control center. For attacks in this regime, the
                smallest set of attacked meters capable of causing
                network unobservability is characterized using a
                graph theoretic approach. By casting the problem
                as one of minimizing a supermodular graph
                functional, the problem of identifying the
                smallest set of vulnerable meters is shown to have
                polynomial complexity. For the weak attack regime
                where the adversary controls only a small number
                of meters, the problem is examined from a decision
                theoretic perspective for both the control center
                and the adversary. For the control center, a
                generalized likelihood ratio detector is proposed
                that incorporates historical data. For the
                adversary, the trade-off between maximizing
                estimation error at the control center and
                minimizing detection probability of the launched
                attack is examined. An optimal attack based on
                minimum energy leakage is proposed. },
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/879.html}
  }
  

Posted by Mary Stewart on 4 Apr 2012.
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