Profiting from attacks on real-time price communications in smart grids

The smart grid (SG) promises to revolutionize power grid efficiency and reliability by bringing wide-area control and coordination between both power producers and widely distributed consumers. Such improvements, however, depend on reliable communication infrastructures for cooperation, thus creating an interdependence between wide area networks and the power grid. Real-time pricing (RTP) systems coordinate producers and consumers via price signals, and recent research has shown that network disruptions in RTPs can significantly harm or disrupt power grid operation. In this paper, we theorize and demonstrate how strategic network disruptions can further disrupt grid operations in ways that are profitable to a strategic adversary. We quantify the economic impacts of a strategic adversary that utilizes denial of service (DoS) attacks to gain a financial advantage in the power market, without compromising the integrity of the RTP signals. The adversary develops a strategy of when and where to launch DoS attacks by utilizing our algorithm that optimizes prices in her favor. A defender minimizes these financial gains by obfuscating the network targets, reducing the effectiveness of attacks. Our results provide insights to the dependability of RTP when deployed across disruptable wide-area best-effort communication networks.