Taxonomy of Attacks for Agent-Based Smart Grids

Being the most important critical infrastructure in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), a smart grid exhibits the complicated nature of large scale, distributed, and dynamic environment. Taxonomy of attacks is an effective tool in systematically classifying attacks and it has been placed as a top research topic in CPS by a National Science Foundation (NSG) Workshop. Most existing taxonomy of attacks in CPS are inadequate in addressing the tight coupling of cyber-physical process or/and lack systematical construction. This paper attempts to introduce taxonomy of attacks of agent-based smart grids as an effective tool to provide a structured framework. The proposed idea of introducing the structure of space-time and information flow direction, security feature, and cyber-physical causality is innovative, and it can establish a taxonomy design mechanism that can systematically construct the taxonomy of cyber attacks, which could have a potential impact on the normal operation of the agent-based smart grids. Based on the cyber-physical relationship revealed in the taxonomy, a concrete physical process based cyber attack detection scheme has been proposed. A numerical illustrative example has been provided to validate the proposed physical process based cyber detection scheme.

List of Symbols and Acronyms

State gain matrix for device .

Phase angle of node voltage.

Real power supplied at node .

Reactive power supplied at node .

Transformation matrix from frame.

Control inputs for device .

,

Device d-axis voltage and current.

,

Device q-axis voltage and current.

,

Device D-axis voltage and current.

,

Device Q-axis voltage and current.

State vector for device .

Impedance matrix for device .

AVD

Attack-vulnerability-damage.

CPPA

Cyber-physical process approach.

CPS

Cyber-physical system.

CSTA

Cyber-physical theoretic approach.

DER

Distributed Energy Resource.

DN

Device node.

ICT

Intelligent Communications Technology.

IDT

Intrusion Detection System.

NSF

National Science Foundation.

SCADA

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition.

SOA

Service oriented architecture.

RN

Root node.

SN

Super node.

TN

Through node.

ZIPN

Z (impedance) I (current) P (power) node.