Stealthy and profitable data injection attack on real time electricity market with network model uncertainties

Abstract

The economic operations of real time (RT) electricity markets are vulnerable to false data injection (FDI) attacks, designed by cyber-attackers. Strategically, the RT locational marginal prices (LMPs) are stealthily altered by manipulating some of measurement data and it provides conditions for profitable financial misconduct in the electricity market. This paper proposes a new Monte Carlo-based FDI attack strategy for a cyber-attacker, who has very limited knowledge about the topology and parametric information of targeted network, which called an attacker with model topology-parametric uncertainties (TPUs). The main feature of the proposed attack is that despite the model errors, the attacker can guarantee the stealthy and profitable attack in advance, since the attack is designed based on an optimization problem of worst-case robust against uncertainties. Two 5-bus PJM and 30 IEEE bus systems are used to demonstrate the success of such cyber-attacks in real-time electricity markets. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.