Secure Distributed Dynamic State Estimation in Wide-Area Smart Grids

Smart grid is a large complex network with a myriad of vulnerabilities, usually operated in adversarial settings and regulated based on estimated system states. In this study, we propose a novel highly secure distributed dynamic state estimation mechanism for wide-area (multi-area) smart grids, composed of geographically separated subregions, each supervised by a local control center. We firstly propose a distributed state estimator assuming regular system operation, that achieves near-optimal performance based on the local Kalman filters and with the exchange of necessary information between local centers. To enhance the security, we further propose to (i) protect the network database and the network communication channels against attacks and data manipulations via a blockchain (BC)-based system design, where the BC operates on the peer-to-peer network of local centers, (ii) locally detect the measurement anomalies in real-time to eliminate their effects on the state estimation process, and (iii) detect misbehaving (hacked/faulty) local centers in real-time via a distributed trust management scheme over the network. We provide theoretical guarantees regarding the false alarm rates of the proposed detection schemes, where the false alarms can be easily controlled. Numerical studies illustrate that the proposed mechanism offers reliable state estimation under regular system operation, timely and accurate detection of anomalies, and good state recovery performance in case of anomalies

A Satisfiability Modulo Theory Approach to Secure State Reconstruction in Differentially Flat Systems Under Sensor Attacks

We address the problem of estimating the state of a differentially flat system from measurements that may be corrupted by an adversarial attack. In cyber-physical systems, malicious attacks can directly compromise the system's sensors or manipulate the communication between sensors and controllers. We consider attacks that only corrupt a subset of sensor measurements. We show that the possibility of reconstructing the state under such attacks is characterized by a suitable generalization of the notion of s-sparse observability, previously introduced by some of the authors in the linear case. We also extend our previous work on the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theory solvers to estimate the state under sensor attacks to the context of differentially flat systems. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated on the problem of controlling a quadrotor under sensor attacks.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1412.432

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

An Unknown Input Multi-Observer Approach for Estimation and Control under Adversarial Attacks

We address the problem of state estimation, attack isolation, and control of discrete-time linear time-invariant systems under (potentially unbounded) actuator and sensor false data injection attacks. Using a bank of unknown input observers, each observer leading to an exponentially stable estimation error (in the attack-free case), we propose an observer-based estimator that provides exponential estimates of the system state in spite of actuator and sensor attacks. Exploiting sensor and actuator redundancy, the estimation scheme is guaranteed to work if a sufficiently small subset of sensors and actuators are under attack. Using the proposed estimator, we provide tools for reconstructing and isolating actuator and sensor attacks; and a control scheme capable of stabilizing the closed-loop dynamics by switching off isolated actuators. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of our tools.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1811.1015

A virtual actuator approach for the secure control of networked LPV systems under pulse-width modulated DoS attacks

In this paper, we formulate and analyze the problem of secure control in the context of networked linear parameter varying (LPV) systems. We consider an energy-constrained, pulse-width modulated (PWM) jammer, which corrupts the control communication channel by performing a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. In particular, the malicious attacker is able to erase the data sent to one or more actuators. In order to achieve secure control, we propose a virtual actuator technique under the assumption that the behavior of the attacker has been identified. The main advantage brought by this technique is that the existing components in the control system can be maintained without need of retuning them, since the virtual actuator will perform a reconfiguration of the plant, hiding the attack from the controller point of view. Using Lyapunov-based results that take into account the possible behavior of the attacker, design conditions for calculating the virtual actuators gains are obtained. A numerical example is used to illustrate the proposed secure control strategy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Performance analysis with network-enhanced complexities: On fading measurements, event-triggered mechanisms, and cyber attacks

Copyright © 2014 Derui Ding et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Nowadays, the real-world systems are usually subject to various complexities such as parameter uncertainties, time-delays, and nonlinear disturbances. For networked systems, especially large-scale systems such as multiagent systems and systems over sensor networks, the complexities are inevitably enhanced in terms of their degrees or intensities because of the usage of the communication networks. Therefore, it would be interesting to (1) examine how this kind of network-enhanced complexities affects the control or filtering performance; and (2) develop some suitable approaches for controller/filter design problems. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the performance analysis and synthesis with three sorts of fashionable network-enhanced complexities, namely, fading measurements, event-triggered mechanisms, and attack behaviors of adversaries. First, these three kinds of complexities are introduced in detail according to their engineering backgrounds, dynamical characteristic, and modelling techniques. Then, the developments of the performance analysis and synthesis issues for various networked systems are systematically reviewed. Furthermore, some challenges are illustrated by using a thorough literature review and some possible future research directions are highlighted.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61134009, 61329301, 61203139, 61374127, and 61374010, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Secure Trajectory Planning Against Undetectable Spoofing Attacks

This paper studies, for the first time, the trajectory planning problem in adversarial environments, where the objective is to design the trajectory of a robot to reach a desired final state despite the unknown and arbitrary action of an attacker. In particular, we consider a robot moving in a two-dimensional space and equipped with two sensors, namely, a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) sensor and a Radio Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) sensor. The attacker can arbitrarily spoof the readings of the GNSS sensor and the robot control input so as to maximally deviate his trajectory from the nominal precomputed path. We derive explicit and constructive conditions for the existence of undetectable attacks, through which the attacker deviates the robot trajectory in a stealthy way. Conversely, we characterize the existence of secure trajectories, which guarantee that the robot either moves along the nominal trajectory or that the attack remains detectable. We show that secure trajectories can only exist between a subset of states, and provide a numerical mechanism to compute them. We illustrate our findings through several numerical studies, and discuss that our methods are applicable to different models of robot dynamics, including unicycles. More generally, our results show how control design affects security in systems with nonlinear dynamics.Comment: Accepted for publication in Automatic