One Breaker is Enough: Hidden Topology Attacks on Power Grids
This addresses vulnerabilities in power grid security for operators, extending attack scope to grids secure from meter corruption, but is incremental as it builds on existing cyber-attack frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of cyber-attacks on power grids by changing breaker statuses to affect topology estimation, showing that an optimal attack requires altering only one transmission line, as demonstrated through simulations on IEEE test cases.
A coordinated cyber-attack on grid meter readings and breaker statuses can lead to incorrect state estimation that can subsequently destabilize the grid. This paper studies cyber-attacks by an adversary that changes breaker statuses on transmission lines to affect the estimation of the grid topology. The adversary, however, is incapable of changing the value of any meter data and can only block recorded measurements on certain lines from being transmitted to the control center. The proposed framework, with limited resource requirements as compared to standard data attacks, thus extends the scope of cyber-attacks to grids secure from meter corruption. We discuss necessary and sufficient conditions for feasible attacks using a novel graph-coloring based analysis and show that an optimal attack requires breaker status change at only ONE transmission line. The potency of our attack regime is demonstrated through simulations on IEEE test cases.