Detecting Subspace Malicious Vectors Attack Against Smart Grid Using Sequence-Alignment Method

Abstract

The energy sector is moving toward the new Digital Substation Architecture which will introduce new opportunities for the smart grid, applications, monitoring and control. Nevertheless, the new advancements come with its own risk, such as the creation of new security attack surfaces. For example, targeting the data integrity of system, the attacker can manipulate the critical operational data using sophisticated algorithms resulting in incorrect operation decision making. This attack method is aimed to create subspace malicious vectors according to the system configuration to be launched as augmented vectors to the actual field data. This attack will impose the operators to take actions based on altered data which will lead to system failure or blackout. The malicious subspaces vectors will impact the state variables of power grid buses and bypass integrity data validation test. This paper used IEEE-9 bus system to demonstrate the methods for generating malicious subspace vectors to be used and alter the data integrity. The corrupted data can be applied to the integrity validation test and assure the operator that the data integrity has been verified successfully. This paper is proposing a practical solution to detect such an attack scenario by comparing sequences of malicious behaviors used in the analysis of attack activity patterns. Therefore, the proposed method is to evaluate behavior method which is employed on IEEE 9-bus system, and the result has demonstrated the effectiveness of using sequence-alignment methods to detect certain behaviors of generating subspace attacking vectors against smart Grid.