Cyber Risk Analysis of Combined Data Attacks Against Power System State Estimation

Understanding smart grid cyber attacks is key for developing appropriate protection and recovery measures. Advanced attacks pursue maximized impact at minimized costs and detectability. This paper conducts risk analysis of combined data integrity and availability attacks against the power system state estimation. We compare the combined attacks with pure integrity attacks - false data injection (FDI) attacks. A security index for vulnerability assessment to these two kinds of attacks is proposed and formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem. We show that such combined attacks can succeed with fewer resources than FDI attacks. The combined attacks with limited knowledge of the system model also expose advantages in keeping stealth against the bad data detection. Finally, the risk of combined attacks to reliable system operation is evaluated using the results from vulnerability assessment and attack impact analysis. The findings in this paper are validated and supported by a detailed case study.