CPS: market analysis of attacks against demand response in the smart grid

Demand response systems assume an electricity retail-market with strategic electricity consuming agents. The goal in these systems is to design load shaping mechanisms to achieve efficiency of resources and customer satisfaction. Recent research efforts have studied the impact of integrity attacks in simplified versions of the demand response problem, where neither the load consuming agents nor the adversary are strategic. In this paper, we study the impact of integrity attacks considering strategic players (a social planner or a consumer) and a strategic attacker. We identify two types of attackers: (1) a malicious attacker who wants to damage the equipment in the power grid by producing sudden overloads, and (2) a selfish attacker that wants to defraud the system by compromising and then manipulating control (load shaping) signals. We then explore the resiliency of two different demand response systems to these fraudsters and malicious attackers. Our results provide guidelines for system operators deciding which type of demand-response system they want to implement, how to secure them, and directions for detecting these attacks.