Dynamic attacks on power systems economic dispatch

A dynamic data attack on a power system aimed at making the real time economic dispatch infeasible is considered. As a man-in-the-middle attack, the attack modifies part of sensor measurements such that the control center is misled with an incorrect system state estimate, which affects the computation of real time economic dispatch. Two attack mechanisms are considered. The first is an opportunistic approach where the attacker waits for a chance of a successful attack and launches an attack in a single state estimation period. The second is a dynamic attack strategy where the attacker gradually drifts the system state toward the infeasible region for real time economic dispatch. The efficacy of the proposed attacks is demonstrated by numerical experiments with the IEEE 14-bus network.