Smart Grid addresses the problem of existing powergrid\’s increasing complexity, growing demand and requirement for greater reliability, through two-way communication and automated residential load control among others. These features also makes the Smart Grid a target for a number of cyber attacks. The load profiles of consumers could be changed through the fabrication of price messages. This attack could lead to cascading failures. Our work is the first attempt to study the effect of such cyber attacks on smart grid, seeking the vulnerable critical nodes. With linearized DC power flow model and cascading failure in power grid models, we also provide solutions to mitigate or reduce the damage due to the cascading failures.

Objectives:

• Find vulnerable nodes where price modification attacks have potential to cause large blackouts
• Find measures to mitigate the cascading failures due to price modification attacks

Selected Publications:

• S. Mishra, X .Li, T. Pan, A. Kuhnle, M. T. Thai, and J. Seo. “Price Modification Attack and Protection Scheme in Smart Grid,” in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 2016
• S. Mishra, X. Li, A. Kuhnle, M. T. Thai, and J. Seo. “Rate Alteration Attacks in Smart Grid,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Int Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2015
• S. Mishra, X. Li, M. T. Thai, and J. Seo. “Cascading Critical Nodes Detection with Load Redistribution in Complex Systems,” in Proceedings of the 8th Annual International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (COCOA), 2014