Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Executive Committee 
 Postdocs 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Ulam Scholar 
 
 Postdoc Nominations 
 Student Requests 
 Student Program 
 Visitor Requests 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Thursday, April 19, 2012
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Postdoc Seminar

Smart Grid Data Integrity Attacks: Characterizations and Countermeasures

Annarita Giani
D-4 and CNLS

In this talk we concentrate on data integrity attacks to power grid data. Real power injections at loads and generators, and real power flows on selected lines in a transmission network are monitored, transmitted over a SCADA network to the system operator, and used in state estimation algorithms to make dispatch, re-balance and other energy management system [EMS] decisions. Coordinated cyberattacks of power meter readings can be arranged to be undetectable by any bad data detection algorithm. These unobservable attacks present a serious threat to grid operations. Of particular interest are sparse attacks that involve the compromise of a modest number of meter readings. The contribution of our work are the following. In the special circumstance where all lines are metered, we derive canonical forms for 3, 4, and 5-sparse unobservable attacks in terms of the graph of the power network. And, given a power network, we offer an algorithm to find them. We next consider the problem of using known-secure PMUs to thwart an arbitrary collection of cyberattacks. We offer a characterization of buses at which these PMUs must be placed to mitigate the collection of attacks. Finding the minimum number of necessary PMUs is NP-hard. We show that it is sufficient to place p+1 PMUs at carefully chosen buses to neutralize a collection of p cyberattacks.

Host: Kipton Barros, T-4 and CNLS