Taxonomy of Attacks for Agent-Based Smart Grids

Being the most important critical infrastructure in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), a smart grid exhibits the complicated nature of large scale, distributed, and dynamic environment. Taxonomy of attacks is an effective tool in systematically classifying attacks and it has been placed as a top research topic in CPS by a National Science Foundation (NSG) Workshop. Most existing taxonomy of attacks in CPS are inadequate in addressing the tight coupling of cyber-physical process or/and lack systematical construction. This paper attempts to introduce taxonomy of attacks of agent-based smart grids as an effective tool to provide a structured framework. The proposed idea of introducing the structure of space-time and information flow direction, security feature, and cyber-physical causality is innovative, and it can establish a taxonomy design mechanism that can systematically construct the taxonomy of cyber attacks, which could have a potential impact on the normal operation of the agent-based smart grids. Based on the cyber-physical relationship revealed in the taxonomy, a concrete physical process based cyber attack detection scheme has been proposed. A numerical illustrative example has been provided to validate the proposed physical process based cyber detection scheme.