Inter-area Oscillations caused by Cyber Attacks and their Countermeasures

Abstract

With the rapid technological advances in the smart grid, cyber-attacks have become a major cause of concern for the grid security. In this paper, a major type of cyber-attack, known as the time-delay attack (TDA), is analyzed for inter-area oscillations (IAO) in a power system. An attack vector is derived at first that is based on the Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack with stealthy properties. To defend against such attacks, a risk assessment metric is introduced based on cyber-physical configurations of victim systems. The performance of the proposed risk assessment metric against attack vectors is tested on a four-machine-two-area system.