Denial of Service Attacks and Mitigation for Stability in Cyber-Enabled Power Grid

Abstract—Monitoring and actuation represent critical tasks for electric power utilities to maintain system stability and reliability. As such, the utility is highly dependent on a low latency communication infrastructure for receiving and transmitting measurement and control data to make accurate decisions. This dependency, however, can be exploited by an adversary to disrupt the integrity of the grid. We demonstrate that Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, even if perpetrated on a subset of cyber communication nodes, has the potential to succeed in disrupting the overall grid. One countermeasure to DoS attacks is enabling cyber elements to distributively reconfigure the system’s routing topology so that malicious nodes are isolated. We propose a collaborative reputation-based topology configuration scheme and through game theoretic principles we prove that a low-latency Nash Equilibrium routing topology always exists for the system. Numerical results indicate that during an attack on a subset of cyber nodes, the proposed algorithm effectively enables the remaining nodes to converge quickly to an equilibrium topology and maintain dynamical stability in the specific instance of an islanded microgrid system. I