Implication of Unobservable State-and-topology Cyber-physical Attacks
For power grid operators, this work highlights a new class of attacks that can cause physical damage while remaining undetected.
The paper studies unobservable state-and-topology cyber-physical attacks that manipulate state and topology data to mask physical attacks, showing they can increase vulnerability to line outages and failures.
This paper studies the physical consequences of a class of unobservable state-and-topology cyber-physical attacks in which both state and topology data for a sub-network of the network are changed by an attacker to mask a physical attack. The problem is formulated as a two-stage optimization problem which aims to cause overload in a line of the network with limited attack resources. It is shown that unobservable state-and-topology cyber-physical attacks as studied in this paper can make the system operation more vulnerable to line outages and failures.