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Adversarial Attacks to Distributed Voltage Control in Power Distribution Networks with DERs

Authors:

Xiaojun LinAuthors Info & Claims

e-Energy '18: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Future Energy Systems

Pages 291 - 302

https://doi.org/10.1145/3208903.3208912

Published: 12 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

It has been recently proposed that the reactive power injection of distributed energy resources (DERs) can be used to regulate the voltage across the power distribution network, and simple distributed control laws have been recently developed in the literature for performing such distributed Volt/VAR control. However, enabling the reactive-power injection capability of DERs also opens the door for potential adversarial attacks. Specifically, the adversary can compromise a subset of the DERs and use their reactive power to disrupt the voltage profile across the distribution network. In this paper, we study the potential damage (in terms of the voltage disruption) of such adversarial attacks and how to mitigate the damage by controlling the allowable range of reactive power injection at each bus. Somewhat surprisingly and contrary to the intuition that the reactive power injection at legitimate buses should help mitigating the voltage disruption inflicted by the adversary, we demonstrate that an intelligent attacker can actually exploit the response of the legitimate buses to amplify the damage by two times. Such a higher level of damage can be attained even when the adversary has no information about the network topology. We then formulate an optimization problem to limit the potential damage of such adversarial attacks. Our formulation sets the range of the reactive power injection on each bus so that the damage by the adversary is minimized, subject to the constraint that the voltage mismatch (without attack) can still be maintained within a given threshold under an uncertainty set of external inputs. Numerical results demonstrate the validity of our analysis and the effectiveness of our approach to mitigate the damage caused by such attacks.

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Cited By

Xu SYu LLin X(2024)Robust Low-Overhead Control of DER Reactive Power Under Adversarial Attacks and UncertaintyICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622426(3097-3103)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622426
Liu YYang CYu NWang JTian JHuang HZhou YLiu T(2024)CFDI: Coordinated false data injection attack in active distribution networkIET Generation, Transmission & Distribution10.1049/gtd2.1321718:15(2556-2569)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1049/gtd2.13217
Wolgast TVeith ENieße A(2021)Towards reinforcement learning for vulnerability analysis in power-economic systemsEnergy Informatics10.1186/s42162-021-00181-54:S3Online publication date: 13-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1186/s42162-021-00181-5
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Adversarial Attacks to Distributed Voltage Control in Power Distribution Networks with DERs
1. Hardware
  1. Power and energy
    1. Energy distribution
      1. Power networks
      2. Smart grid
2. Security and privacy
  1. Systems security
    1. Distributed systems security

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cover image ACM Conferences

e-Energy '18: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Future Energy Systems

June 2018

657 pages

ISBN:9781450357678

DOI:10.1145/3208903

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 12 June 2018

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National Science Foundation

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e-Energy '18

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SIGCOMM

e-Energy '18: The Ninth International Conference on Future Energy Systems

June 12 - 15, 2018

Karlsruhe, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 160 of 446 submissions, 36%

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Cited By

Xu SYu LLin X(2024)Robust Low-Overhead Control of DER Reactive Power Under Adversarial Attacks and UncertaintyICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622426(3097-3103)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622426
Liu YYang CYu NWang JTian JHuang HZhou YLiu T(2024)CFDI: Coordinated false data injection attack in active distribution networkIET Generation, Transmission & Distribution10.1049/gtd2.1321718:15(2556-2569)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1049/gtd2.13217
Wolgast TVeith ENieße A(2021)Towards reinforcement learning for vulnerability analysis in power-economic systemsEnergy Informatics10.1186/s42162-021-00181-54:S3Online publication date: 13-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1186/s42162-021-00181-5
Petrovski S(2021)Fault Classification by Intelligent Systems to Ensure Electromagnetic Compatibility of Vehicles2021 International Conference on Industrial Engineering, Applications and Manufacturing (ICIEAM)10.1109/ICIEAM51226.2021.9446335(976-981)Online publication date: 17-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIEAM51226.2021.9446335
Bhusal NGautam MBenidris M(2021)Detection of Cyber Attacks on Voltage Regulation in Distribution Systems Using Machine LearningIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30646899(40402-40416)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3064689
Majdani FBatik LPetrovski APetrovski S(2020)Detecting Malicious Signal Manipulation in Smart Grids Using Intelligent Analysis of Contextual Data13th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks10.1145/3433174.3433613(1-8)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3433174.3433613
Veith EFischer LTröschel MNieße A(2019)Analyzing Cyber-Physical Systems from the Perspective of Artificial IntelligenceProceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Control10.1145/3388218.3388222(85-95)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3388218.3388222
Rahman MRana M(2019)Compensation for Voltage Disruption in a Smart Grid during Cyber–Attack2019 1st International Conference on Advances in Science, Engineering and Robotics Technology (ICASERT)10.1109/ICASERT.2019.8934803(1-5)Online publication date: May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASERT.2019.8934803
Rahman AKamal MIslam A(2019)Bridge Strength Preservation by Automatic Traffic Density Control: an IoT Application2019 1st International Conference on Advances in Science, Engineering and Robotics Technology (ICASERT)10.1109/ICASERT.2019.8934520(1-5)Online publication date: May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASERT.2019.8934520
Johnson JQuiroz JConcepcion RWilches‐Bernal FReno M(2019)Power system effects and mitigation recommendations for DER cyberattacksIET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory & Applications10.1049/iet-cps.2018.50144:3(240-249)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2019
https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-cps.2018.5014

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