Attacking power grids with secure meters: The case for breakers and Jammers

Undetectable data attacks on the power grid produces errors in the state estimation that can potentially affect electricity prices as well as make the grid vulnerable to failures. A new hidden attack framework is presented for power grids where all meter measurements are secure from injection of malicious data. An adversary here only jams or blocks meter data from being sent to the control center. Additionally the adversary causes errors in the status of breakers in the grid to change the topological estimate of the grid. Necessary and sufficient conditions for a successful hidden attack in this regime are discussed and an algorithm to determine an optimal attack involving the minimum set of breaker status errors is developed. The efficacy of this novel attack strategy that does not require corruption of any meter data is shown through examples.