Impact of integrity attacks on real-time pricing in smart grids
It addresses cybersecurity risks for smart grid operators, providing guidelines to secure RTP systems, but is incremental as it builds on known control-theoretic approaches to analyze specific attack types.
This paper tackles the problem of cybersecurity threats to real-time pricing (RTP) in smart grids by analyzing how integrity attacks can destabilize the system, showing that scaling attacks reducing price values or delay attacks affecting over half of consumers can cause inefficiencies or blackouts.
Modern information and communication technologies used by smart grids are subject to cybersecurity threats. This paper studies the impact of integrity attacks on real-time pricing (RTP), a key feature of smart grids that uses such technologies to improve system efficiency. Recent studies have shown that RTP creates a closed loop formed by the mutually dependent real-time price signals and price-taking demand. Such a closed loop can be exploited by an adversary whose objective is to destabilize the pricing system. Specifically, small malicious modifications to the price signals can be iteratively amplified by the closed loop, causing inefficiency and even severe failures such as blackouts. This paper adopts a control-theoretic approach to deriving the fundamental conditions of RTP stability under two broad classes of integrity attacks, namely, the scaling and delay attacks. We show that the RTP system is at risk of being destabilized only if the adversary can compromise the price signals advertised to smart meters by reducing their values in the scaling attack, or by providing old prices to over half of all consumers in the delay attack. The results provide useful guidelines for system operators to analyze the impact of various attack parameters on system stability, so that they may take adequate measures to secure RTP systems.