Detection Scheme Against Cyber-Physical Attacks on Load Frequency Control Based on Dynamic Characteristics Analysis

The safety and security of load frequency control (LFC) system are menaced by cyber attacks and physical attacks. Sophisticated attackers can launch cyber-physical attacks (CPAs), in which cyber attacks are used to increase the impacts of physical attacks by sending wrong instructions to the LFC controller. Considering that parameters of cyber attacks in CPAs may be either fixed or variable, a novel detection scheme is designed against two potential CPAs on an LFC system, namely fixed cyber-physical attacks (FCPAs) and variable cyber-physical attacks (VCPAs), respectively. As for FCPAs, dynamic characteristics of Area Control Error (ACE) are utilized to detect the compromised data. Compared with FCPAs, VCPAs are more deceptive. A relation-based (RB) feature extraction method is introduced to distinguish the signals compromised by VCPAs from the normal ones. A detection model that does not require compromised samples is developed with the aid of support vector domain description. In the end, a comprehensive detection scheme is designed to detect both FCPAs and VCPAs on the LFC system.