CCPA: Coordinated Cyber-Physical Attacks and Countermeasures in Smart Grid

Abstract

Smart grid, as one of the most critical infrastructures, is vulnerable to a wide variety of cyber and/or physical attacks. Recently, a new category of threats to smart grid, named coordinated cyber-physical attacks (CCPAs), are emerging. A key feature of CCPAs is to leverage cyber attacks to mask physical attacks which can cause power outages and potentially trigger cascading failures. In this paper, we investigate CCPAs in smart grid and show that an adversary can carefully synthesize a false data injection attack vector based on phasor measurement unit (PMU) measurements to neutralize the impact of physical attack vector, such that CCPAs could circumvent bad data detection without being detected. Specifically, we present two potential CCPAs, namely replay and optimized CCPAs, respectively, and analyze the adversary's required capability to construct them. Based on the analytical results, countermeasures are proposed to detect the two kinds of CCPAs, through known-secure PMU measurement verification (in the cyber space) and online tracking of the power system equivalent impedance (in the physical space), respectively. The implementation of CCPAs in smart grid and the effectiveness of countermeasures are demonstrated by using an illustrative 4-bus power system and the IEEE 9-bus, 14-bus, 30-bus, 118-bus, and 300-bus test power systems.