Cost-Benefit Analysis of Moving-Target Defense in Power Grids
This work addresses security and cost trade-offs for power grid operators, but it is incremental as it builds on prior MTD methods by adding cost analysis.
The paper tackles the problem of designing moving-target defense (MTD) to detect stealthy false data injection attacks in power grids by proposing formal criteria for effective reactance perturbations, but finds this incurs non-trivial operational costs, leading to a characterization of trade-offs between detection capability and cost, with simulations on IEEE bus systems verifying the approach.
We study moving-target defense (MTD) that actively perturbs transmission line reactances to thwart stealthy false data injection (FDI) attacks against state estimation in a power grid. Prior work on this topic has proposed MTD based on randomly selected reactance perturbations, but these perturbations cannot guarantee effective attack detection. To address the issue, we present formal design criteria to select MTD reactance perturbations that are truly effective. However, based on a key optimal power flow (OPF) formulation, we find that the effective MTD may incur a non-trivial operational cost that has not hitherto received attention. Accordingly, we characterize important tradeoffs between the MTD's detection capability and its associated required cost. Extensive simulations, using the MATPOWER simulator and benchmark IEEE bus systems, verify and illustrate the proposed design approach that for the first time addresses both key aspects of cost and effectiveness of the MTD.