Power flow cyber attacks and perturbation-based defense

In this paper, we present two contributions to false data injection attacks and mitigation in electric power systems. First, we introduce a method of creating unobservable attacks on the AC power flow equations. The attack strategy details how an adversary can launch a stealthy attack to achieve a goal. Then, we introduce a proactive defense strategy that is capable of detecting attacks. The defense strategy introduces known perturbations by deliberately probing the system in a specific, structured manner. We show that the proposed approach, under certain conditions, is able to detect the presence of false data injection attacks, as well the attack locations and information about the manipulated data values.