REACT to Cyber Attacks on Power Grids

Abstract: Motivated by the recent cyber attack on the Ukrainian power grid, we study cyber attacks on power grids that affect both the physical infrastructure and the data at the control center. In particular, we assume that an adversary attacks an area by: (i) remotely disconnecting some lines within the attacked area, and (ii) modifying the information received from the attacked area to mask the line failures and hide the attacked area from the control center. For the latter, we consider two types of attacks: (i) data distortion: which distorts the data by adding powerful noise to the actual data, and (ii) data replay: which replays a locally consistent old data instead of the actual data. We use the DC power flow model and prove that the problem of finding the set of line failures given the phase angles of the nodes outside of the attacked area is strongly NP-hard, even when the attacked area is known. However, we introduce the polynomial time REcurrent Attack Containment and deTection (REACT) Algorithm to approximately detect the attacked area and line failures after a cyber attack. We numerically show that it performs very well in detecting the attacked area, and detecting single, double, and triple line failures in small and large attacked areas.