Physical model learning based false data injection attack on power system state estimation

The cyber security of power system state estimation (PSSE) is crucial, and its robustness against evolving false data injection attacks (FDIA) is being rigorously assessed to develop advanced countermeasures. Existing FDIA methods have achieved satisfactory success rates but often fail to align with practical constraints such as the assumption of partial or complete knowledge of the power system network by the attacker, modifications in generator output measurements, and the sparsity of the attacks. This work proposes a near practical, stealthy approach using a deep generative adversarial network-long short-term memory autoencoder (GAN-LSTMAE) learning based sparse FDIA method against AC PSSE, leveraging only measurement data. To evade the bad data detection (BDD) mechanism effectively, an LSTMAE-based PSSE mimic is proposed, further optimizing the GAN-based attack generator to embed the physical laws of the system along with measurement residuals and temporal dependencies of states to the generated false data. The proposed modified training data preparation algorithm, coupled with the attack sub-graph method, defines the optimal attack region while keeping generator output measurements intact. The generated attack is validated extensively using IEEE 14 and 118 bus test benchmarks against various defense techniques, demonstrating high success rates.