Cyber attacks on remote relays in smart grid

As the operations of protection relays are critical to the reliability of power grids, several approaches have been proposed to ensure the reliable operations of these relays in the emerging Smart Grid (SG). However, because these schemes mostly focused on reliability-related issues, they are vulnerable to active cyber attacks that exploit communication networks in SG. To the best of our knowledge, very little research has been conducted in this area. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the potential impact of cyber attacks on current relay protection schemes, to better understand the threats and develop corresponding mitigation. We first explored several attack strategies and analyzed their effectiveness on current agent-based relay protection mechanisms. We further proposed two improvement methods by adopting a majority rule in trip confirmation and disabling remote trip requests at critical relays, to limit false line trips and minimize the chances of cascading failures due to cyber attacks.