research-article

Joint Cyber and Physical Attacks on Power Grids: Graph Theoretical Approaches for Information Recovery

Authors:

Mihalis Yannakakis,

Gil ZussmanAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, Volume 43, Issue 1

Pages 361 - 374

https://doi.org/10.1145/2796314.2745846

Published: 15 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Recent events demonstrated the vulnerability of power grids to cyber attacks and to physical attacks. Therefore, we focus on joint cyber and physical attacks and develop methods to retrieve the grid state information following such an attack. We consider a model in which an adversary attacks a zone by physically disconnecting some of its power lines and blocking the information flow from the zone to the grid's control center. We use tools from linear algebra and graph theory and leverage the properties of the power flow DC approximation to develop methods for information recovery. Using information observed outside the attacked zone, these methods recover information about the disconnected lines and the phase angles at the buses. We identify sufficient conditions on the zone structure and constraints on the attack characteristics such that these methods can recover the information. We also show that it is NP-hard to find an approximate solution to the problem of partitioning the power grid into the minimum number of attack-resilient zones. However, since power grids can often be represented by planar graphs, we develop a constant approximation partitioning algorithm for these graphs. Finally, we numerically study the relationships between the grid's resilience and its structural properties, and demonstrate the partitioning algorithm on real power grids. The results can provide insights into the design of a secure control network for the smart grid.

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Joint Cyber and Physical Attacks on Power Grids: Graph Theoretical Approaches for Information Recovery

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cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review Volume 43, Issue 1

Performance evaluation review

June 2015

468 pages

ISSN:0163-5999

DOI:10.1145/2796314

Editors:
Derek Eager
University of Saskatchewan
,
Carey Williamson
University of Calgary

Issue’s Table of Contents

SIGMETRICS '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
June 2015
488 pages
ISBN:9781450334860
DOI:10.1145/2745844
General Chairs:
Bill Lin
University of California, San Diego
,
Jun (Jim) Xu
Georgia Tech
,
Program Chairs:
Sudipta Sengupta
Microsoft Research
,
Devavrat Shah
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 15 June 2015

Published in SIGMETRICS Volume 43, Issue 1

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National Science Foundation
CIAN NSF ERC
the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement
Defense Threat Reduction Agency

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