Strategic Protection Against Data Injection Attacks on Power Grids

Data injection attacks to manipulate system state estimators on power grids are considered. A unified formulation for the problem of constructing attacking vectors is developed for linearized measurement models. Based on this formulation, a new low-complexity attacking strategy is shown to significantly outperform naive ℓ 1 relaxation. It is demonstrated that it is possible to defend against malicious data injection if a small subset of measurements can be made immune to the attacks. However, selecting such subsets is a high-complexity combinatorial problem given the typically large size of electrical grids. To address the complexity issue, a fast greedy algorithm to select a subset of measurements to be…