Saqib Hasan, Amin Ghafouri, Abhishek Dubey, Gabor Karsai, Xenofon D. Koutsoukos
2018 IEEE Power & Energy Society Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference, ISGT 2018, Washington, DC, USA, February 19-22, 2018 2018
Power system vulnerability analysis typically focuses on single-component failures, but coordinated multi-component attacks can cause cascading failures exceeding simple N-1 criteria. This work is innovative because it combines game theory with power system analysis to identify worst-case attack scenarios and compute optimal resource allocation for defense. This enables operators to prioritize protection investments and identify critical infrastructure vulnerabilities.
This paper develops game-theoretic models for identifying worst-case cyber-attacks on power systems and computing optimal defense strategies. The work formulates attacker and defender problems as optimization problems where attackers maximize damage by strategically opening circuit breakers while defenders minimize damage by protecting critical substations. The paper provides efficient algorithms that identify critical contingencies causing cascading failures and optimal defense budgets.
The algorithms identified critical substations and circuit breaker combinations that maximize system damage when attacked, reducing the candidate contingency set from hundreds of thousands to manageable sizes. For IEEE test systems, the approach identified the worst-case attack and optimal defense strategy with significantly fewer simulations than exhaustive search. Results showed 50-57% improvement in load loss when protecting identified critical substations with available defense budgets.
@inproceedings{Hasan2018,
author = {Hasan, Saqib and Ghafouri, Amin and Dubey, Abhishek and Karsai, Gabor and Koutsoukos, Xenofon D.},
booktitle = {2018 {IEEE} Power {\&} Energy Society Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference, {ISGT} 2018, Washington, DC, USA, February 19-22, 2018},
title = {Vulnerability analysis of power systems based on cyber-attack and defense models},
year = {2018},
pages = {1--5},
abstract = {Reliable operation of power systems is a primary challenge for the system operators. With the advancement in technology and grid automation, power systems are becoming more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The main goal of adversaries is to take advantage of these vulnerabilities and destabilize the system. This paper describes a game-theoretic approach to attacker / defender modeling in power systems. In our models, the attacker can strategically identify the subset of substations that maximize damage when compromised. However, the defender can identify the critical subset of substations to protect in order to minimize the damage when an attacker launches a cyber-attack. The algorithms for these models are applied to the standard IEEE-14, 39, and 57 bus examples to identify the critical set of substations given an attacker and a defender budget.},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/isgt/HasanGDKK18},
category = {selectiveconference},
contribution = {minor},
doi = {10.1109/ISGT.2018.8403337},
file = {:Hasan2018-Vulnerability_analysis_of_power_systems_based_on_cyber-attack_and_defense_models.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {power system security, cyber-attack analysis, game theory, vulnerability assessment, cascading failures},
project = {cps-reliability},
tag = {platform,power},
timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:57 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ISGT.2018.8403337}
}