Breaking nondeducible attacks on the smart grid

Abstract

The evolution of the electric power infrastructure into a smart grid carries with it the potential for residential homes to become malicious attackers on global state estimation. This paper presents an attack model where a distributed cyber controller in a smart grid executes an internal attack to falsify its advertised generation. This differs from current attack models in that the attacker is an active element of the system that participates in its normal operation. Through the use of information flow properties, the attack is proven to be nondeducible and thus unidentifiable in a current smart grid architecture. An adaptation of mutual exclusion is then applied to break the nondeducible attack. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.