Joint cyber and physical attacks against topology of electric grids

Abstract

This paper stands an attacker's point of view to develop a novel attack strategy that causes as much destructive as possible to the topology of electric network. By attacking transmission lines, power flow of girds will be changed, which could cause overload on other lines and possibly trigger cascading failures, and then lead to large areas blackout. Meanwhile, considering the limited resource of attacker, we propose a method to find out the minimum value to corrupt the measurements of attacked area, in order to mislead the control centre into detecting wrong attacked locations. Finally, the proposed attack strategy is explained in detail by IEEE 9-bus systems, and extending this application to a more complex networks that verified by IEEE 14-bus systems. Simulation results show that the damage risks of electric grids, caused by the proposed strategy, are increased at least 50% compared with traditional attack strategy.