A Moving Target Approach for Securing Secondary Frequency Control in Microgrids

Abstract

Microgrids' dependency on communication links exposes the control systems to cyber attack threats. In this work, instead of designing reactive defense approaches, a proacitve moving target defense mechanism is proposed for securing microgrid secondary frequency control from denial of service (DoS) attack. The sensor data is transmitted by following a Markov process, not in a deterministic way. This uncertainty will increase the difficulty for attacker's decision making and thus significantly reduce the attack space. As the system parameters are constantly changing, a gain scheduling based secondary frequency controller is designed to sustain the system performance. Case studies of a microgrid with four inverter-based DGs show the proposed moving target mechanism can enhance the resiliency of the microgrid control systems against DoS attacks.