SPMA: Stealthy Physics-Manipulated Attack and Countermeasures in Cyber-Physical Smart Grid

As a critical infrastructure, the traditional power system has transformed into a cyber-physical integrated smart grid. However, the vulnerabilities exposed in either the cyber or physical layer might be exploited by adversaries to construct complicated and coordinated attacks consequent in destructive impacts. In this paper, we propose a stealthy physics-manipulated attack (SPMA) by masking the physical attacks on the flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) with strategic cyberattacks. To construct the SPMA, we first manipulate the control command sent to the FACTS device to change the reactance and then tamper with the sensor measurements to conceal it. The SPMA is constructed with complete-informed and incomplete-informed attackers, noisy sensor measurements, and a nonlinear AC model, respectively. The impact of the physics manipulation on the real-time economic dispatch and the system’s operation security are formulated and numerically analyzed. Furthermore, we also provide potential countermeasures from three aspects to defend against SPMAs. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted with the IEEE test power systems to evaluate the stealthiness of SPMAs and the economic losses and potential cascading failures caused by SPMAs using real-world load profiles.