Data attack on strategic buses in the power grid: Design and protection

Malicious data attacks on specific buses of the power grid can lead to incorrect state estimation and in turn affect electricity prices and operational stability. A hidden data attack model is presented in this paper which involves an adversary corrupting meter readings in the grid to produce undetectable errors in a set of critical state variables. A polynomial time algorithm is given to identify the minimum set of measurements needed by the adversary to corrupt the desired state variables. To prevent such hidden attacks, a greedy protection algorithm is proposed for two cases, one where the adversary is resource limited and the other where the adversary has no resource constraint. The performances of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated through simulations on different IEEE test systems.