Optimal Data Attacks on Power Grids: Leveraging Detection & Measurement Jamming

Abstract: Meter measurements in the power grid are susceptible to manipulation by adversaries, that can lead to errors in state estimation. This paper presents a general framework to study attacks on state estimation by adversaries capable of injecting bad-data into measurements and further, of jamming their reception. Through these two techniques, a novel detectable jamming' attack is designed that changes the state estimation despite failing bad-data detection checks. Compared to commonly studiedhidden' data attacks, these attacks have lower costs and a wider feasible operating region. It is shown that the entire domain of jamming costs can be divided into two regions, with distinct graph-cut based formulations for the design of the optimal attack. The most significant insight arising from this result is that the adversarial capability to jam measurements changes the optimal 'detectable jamming' attack design only if the jamming cost is less than half the cost of bad-data injection. A polynomial time approximate algorithm for attack vector construction is developed and its efficacy in attack design is demonstrated through simulations on IEEE test systems.