Identifying vulnerabilities of state estimators against cyber-attacks

State estimation has an important role in the operation of power systems and associated power markets. It is well known that state estimators are vulnerable to any existing critical measurements since their errors cannot be detected. Therefore, by manipulating a finite number of critical measurements, a hacker can bias the results of state estimation without being detected. Those biased results include both system states (bus voltage magnitudes and angles) and branch flows that are calculated by using the system states. This work investigates the cyber-attacks carried out by strategically manipulating critical measurements and proposes a method to identify the set of estimated flows that are vulnerable to those cyber-attacks. The proposed method will be described and simulations will be presented to validate the method. The paper considers power systems that are measured by a mixed set of measurements, namely power flow, injection and voltage magnitude measurements, as well as phasor measurements provided by the phasor measurement units (PMUs).