Stealth Attacks on the Smart Grid

Abstract: Random attacks that jointly minimize the amount of information acquired by the operator about the state of the grid and the probability of attack detection are presented. The attacks minimize the information acquired by the operator by minimizing the mutual information between the observations and the state variables describing the grid. Simultaneously, the attacker aims to minimize the probability of attack detection by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the distribution when the attack is present and the distribution under normal operation. The resulting cost function is the weighted sum of the mutual information and the KL divergence mentioned above. The tradeoff between the probability of attack detection and the reduction of mutual information is governed by the weighting parameter on the KL divergence term in the cost function. The probability of attack detection is evaluated as a function of the weighting parameter. A sufficient condition on the weighting parameter is given for achieving an arbitrarily small probability of attack detection. The attack performance is numerically assessed on the IEEE 30-Bus and 118-Bus test systems.