Data Framing Attack on State Estimation
This addresses security vulnerabilities in power system operations, representing an incremental advance in attack mechanisms for critical infrastructure.
The paper tackles the problem of misleading power system control centers about the source of data attacks by proposing a data framing attack that frames correct meters as bad data sources, causing removal of useful measurements; it shows the attack can perturb state estimates arbitrarily by controlling half of a critical measurement set.
A new mechanism aimed at misleading a power system control center about the source of a data attack is proposed. As a man-in-the-middle state attack, a data framing attack is proposed to exploit the bad data detection and identification mechanisms currently in use at most control centers. In particular, the proposed attack frames meters that are providing correct data as sources of bad data such that the control center will remove useful measurements that would otherwise be used by the state estimator. The optimal design of a data framing attack is formulated as a quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP). It is shown that the proposed attack is capable of perturbing the power system state estimate by an arbitrary degree controlling only half of a critical set of measurements that are needed to make a system unobservable. Implications of this attack on power system operations are discussed, and the attack performance is evaluated using benchmark systems.