Subspace Methods for Data Attack on State Estimation: A Data Driven Approach

Data attacks on state estimation modify part of system measurements such that the tempered measurements cause incorrect system state estimates. Attack techniques proposed in the literature often require detailed knowledge of system parameters. Such information is difficult to acquire in practice. The subspace methods presented in this paper, on the other hand, learn the system operating subspace from measurements and launch attacks accordingly. Conditions for the existence of an unobservable subspace attack are obtained under the full and partial measurement models. Using the estimated system subspace, two attack strategies are presented. The first strategy aims to affect the system state directly by hiding the attack vector in the system subspace. The second strategy misleads the bad data detection mechanism so that data not under attack are removed. Performance of these attacks are evaluated using the IEEE 14-bus network and the IEEE 118-bus network.Comment: 12 page

Subspace Methods for Data Attack on State Estimation: A Data Driven Approach

Data attacks on state estimation modify part of system measurements such that the tempered measurements cause incorrect system state estimates. Attack techniques proposed in the literature often require detailed knowledge of system parameters. Such information is difficult to acquire in practice. The subspace methods presented in this paper, on the other hand, learn the system operating subspace from measurements and launch attacks accordingly. Conditions for the existence of an unobservable subspace attack are obtained under the full and partial measurement models. Using the estimated system subspace, two attack strategies are presented. The first strategy aims to affect the system state directly by hiding the attack vector in the system subspace. The second strategy misleads the bad data detection mechanism so that data not under attack are removed. Performance of these attacks are evaluated using the IEEE 14- bus network and the IEEE 118-bus network.©2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works. This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by IEEE-Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=78Keywords: subspace method, cyber physical system, state estimation, data framing attack, false data injectio

Modeling and performance evaluation of stealthy false data injection attacks on smart grid in the presence of corrupted measurements

The false data injection (FDI) attack cannot be detected by the traditional anomaly detection techniques used in the energy system state estimators. In this paper, we demonstrate how FDI attacks can be constructed blindly, i.e., without system knowledge, including topological connectivity and line reactance information. Our analysis reveals that existing FDI attacks become detectable (consequently unsuccessful) by the state estimator if the data contains grossly corrupted measurements such as device malfunction and communication errors. The proposed sparse optimization based stealthy attacks construction strategy overcomes this limitation by separating the gross errors from the measurement matrix. Extensive theoretical modeling and experimental evaluation show that the proposed technique performs more stealthily (has less relative error) and efficiently (fast enough to maintain time requirement) compared to other methods on IEEE benchmark test systems.Comment: Keywords: Smart grid, False data injection, Blind attack, Principal component analysis (PCA), Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Elsevier, 201