On malicious data attacks on power system state estimation

The problem of detecting and characterizing impacts of malicious attacks against smart grid state estimation is considered. Different from the classical bad data detection for state estimation, the detection of malicious data injected by an adversary must take into account carefully designed attacks capable of evading conventional bad data detection. A Bayesian framework is presented for the characterization of fundamental tradeoffs at the control center and for the adversary. For the control center, a detector based on the generalized likelihood ratio test (GRLT) is introduced and compared with conventional bad detection detection schemes. For the adversary, the tradeoff between increasing the mean square error (MSE) of the state estimation vs. the probability of being detected by the control center is characterized. A heuristic is presented for the design of worst attack.