Rate alteration attacks in smart grid

Abstract

Smart Grid addresses the problem of existing power grid's increasing complexity, growing demand and requirement for greater reliability, through two-way communication and automated residential load control among others. These features also makes the Smart Grid a target for a number of cyber attacks. In the paper, we study the problem of rate alteration attack (RAA) through fabrication of price messages which induces changes in load profiles of individual users and eventually causes major alteration in the load profile of the entire network. Combining with cascading failure, it ends up with a highly damaging attack. We prove that the problem is NP-Complete and provide its inapproximability. We devise two approaches for the problem, former deals with maximizing failure of lines with the given resource and then extending the effect with cascading failure while the later takes cascading potential into account while choosing the lines to fail. To get more insight into the impact of RAA, we also extend our algorithms to maximize number of node failures. Empirical results on both IEEE Bus data and real network help us evaluate our approaches under various settings of grid parameters.