BT-MTD: Bus Traversal-based Moving Target Defense for Smart Grid
For smart grid operators, this work provides a more efficient MTD method to protect against stealth attacks with fewer resources.
The paper proposes a bus traversal-based moving target defense (BT-MTD) for smart grids that reduces the number of branch admittance modifications and computational time while maintaining effectiveness. Evaluations on IEEE test systems show superior performance over four existing strategies.
Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a proactive security strategy designed to enhance cyber-resilience by dynamically altering system parameters, thereby preventing adversaries from acquiring the critical information needed to execute stealth attacks. In this paper, we consider the case in which the operator modifies the admittance of branches to enable MTD, and focus on the problem of effectively protecting the system with fewer number of branch admittance modifications and shorter computational time. Specifically, we identify the ineffectual branches whose admittance modification do not contribute to the improvement of MTD effectiveness via theoretical analysis. Building on these insights, we propose the Bus Traversal-based MTD (BT-MTD), which is a bus-oriented algorithm that traverses over the buses of the network according to analytically derived guidelines. The performance of the BT-MTD is evaluated and compared with four existing strategies on standard IEEE test systems, demonstrating its robustness and superior performance in effectiveness, efficiency, and computational cost. The code of BT-MTD is available at: https://github.com/YJY101/BT-MTD.