A Framework for Cyber-Topology Attacks: Line-Switching and New Attack Scenarios

Cyber security of modern power systems has drawn increasing attention in recent years. This paper proposes a class of cyber-topology attacks derived from false data injection attacks, with the aim of disturbing the operation of power systems. Three kinds of cyber-topology attack are proposed: 1) line-addition attack; 2) line-removal attack; and 3) line-switching attack. By directly misleading the decision-making process of the independent system operator, the proposed cyber-topology attack consequently affects the economic operation and security of the system. We establish optimal attack models for different cyber-topology attack scenarios, and use a recently proposed metaheuristic optimization algorithm the natural aggregation algorithm to solve the resulting attack models. Experiments based on the IEEE 39node benchmark system show that the proposed class of attacks poses a significant threat to modern power systems.