A Stealthy Attack Against Electricity Market Using Independent Component Analysis

In smart grid, the strong coupling between cyber and physical operations makes power systems vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this paper, we investigate a new but serious type of attack, stealthy false data attack. In addition, we demonstrate that the attackers are able to, without prior knowledge of the power grid topology, make inferences through phasor observations. For the attackers to achieve this ability, we show that when the change of operating conditions is relatively mild and can be approximated linearly, linear independent component analysis can be applied to estimate the Jacobian matrix multiplied by the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of the state variables. Then, the inferred structural information is used to launch the stealthy attack. This attack is formulated to change the price of electricity in the realtime market for the benefits of attackers. As demonstrated by the simulation results using data generated by MATPOWER, the proposed scheme injects undetectable false data and changes the price of electricity at the desired locations.