Efficient Computations of a Security Index for False Data Attacks in Power Networks
Journal article, 2014

The resilience of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for electric power networks for certain cyber-attacks is considered. We analyze the vulnerability of the measurement system to false data attack on communicated measurements. The vulnerability analysis problem is shown to be NP-hard, meaning that unless $P = NP$ there is no polynomial time algorithm to analyze the vulnerability of the system. Nevertheless, we identify situations, such as the full measurement case, where the analysis problem can be solved efficiently. In such cases, we show indeed that the problem can be cast as a generalization of the minimum cut problem involving nodes with possibly nonzero costs. We further show that it can be reformulated as a standard minimum cut problem (without node costs) on a modified graph of proportional size. An important consequence of this result is that our approach provides the first exact efficient algorithm for the vulnerability analysis problem under the full measurement assumption. Furthermore, our approach also provides an efficient heuristic algorithm for the general NP-hard problem. Our results are illustrated by numerical studies on benchmark systems including the IEEE 118-bus system.

smart grids

network theory (graph)

Mathematical programming

power system security

SCADA systems

Author

Julien Hendrickx

Universite catholique de Louvain

Karl Henrik Johansson

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Raphael Jungers

Universite catholique de Louvain

Henrik Sandberg

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Kin Cheong Sou

University of Gothenburg

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Mathematics

IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control

0018-9286 (ISSN) 1558-2523 (eISSN)

Vol. 59 12 3194-3208 6882830

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Energy

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Subject Categories

Control Engineering

DOI

10.1109/TAC.2014.2351625

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 6